European Nature Restoration Law – an opportunity for a win-win for nature and industry

Joint Statement between extractive sector and civil society

The Nature Restoration Law offers a key opportunity to bring nature back to Europe, benefiting biodiversity, climate, and people. Nature restoration is an inherent part of the solution to tackle the biodiversity and climate crises. It is our best insurance policy for climate adaptation through increased resilience to droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events. Consequently, it also contributes to long-term food security.

Building on a long-standing collaboration with BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, the co-signing industry associations express their support for a European Nature Restoration Law as a milestone to reverse the tide of biodiversity loss and climate change at the scale needed. Representing a very large part of the European non-energy extractive industry, the co-signing sectors can hugely contribute to achieve the nature restoration objectives, having already implemented restoration plans for many extraction sites. In essence, nature restoration is unarguably part of the extraction business.

To be able to unleash the full restoration potential and contribution by the industry, we believe that the following elements should be addressed by the decision makers:

1. the sectors efforts to plan and implement nature restoration, such as in-situ restoration, should be taken into account in the Member State’s national restoration plans,
2. the value of temporary nature as is defined and included in the Nature Directives Species Protection Guidelines should be considered in the Member State’s nature restoration processes, in particular to support pioneer species,
3. the legal framework for restoration efforts outside of Natura 2000 areas should consider the sector`s specificities on a case-by-case and strive to ensure a win-win for nature and industry.

We strongly support having a regulation and favour an approach which allows for further involvement of local stakeholders at Member State level when it comes to implementing the future nature restoration provisions.