Brussels, 05/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 5 May, an online public consultation on the effectiveness of the 'Habitats' and 'Birds' directives - two key pieces of EU legislation for nature protection - was launched by the European Commission, to run for 12 weeks. The Commission wants to know whether the directives are fit for purpose and whether any revision is needed.
All interested parties are therefore invited to give their opinion, by filling in a questionnaire. The contributions received will allow the Commission to draw up a “health check” of the two directives and decide, early next year, whether they should be revised and merged into “a single piece of more modern legislation”. When he took up his position, the European Commissioner for the Environment, Karmenu Vella, was asked to carry out an in-depth assessment of this legislation in accordance with the agenda of Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, who is responsible for “better regulation” and the “REFIT” initiative for efficient legislation.
Interested parties will be asked to state: the degree of importance they attach to nature conservation; their degree of familiarity with the conservation measures; their assessment of the importance of the Natura 2000 network; whether they support the strategic objectives of the two directives and whether these objectives are appropriate; whether these legislations add value to the economy and whether they have any added value at a social level; what has been the general and specific effect of the two directives so far; to what extent the two directives have helped to achieve the objectives of the EU strategy in favour of biodiversity, which aims to halt the decline of biodiversity by 2020 and do as much as possible to restore the ecosystems by this date; what is the cost/benefit ratio of the implementation of these directives.
The directive on the protection of wild birds (79/409/EEC) aims to maintain or adapt the population of all species of wild birds in the EU to a level corresponding to the ecological, scientific and cultural requirements, whilst taking account of economic and leisure needs. The directive on the protection of habitats, wild flora and fauna (directive 92/43/EEC) has the strategic objective of maintaining or re-establishing natural habitats and those of wild species, whilst taking account of the economic, social and cultural requirements and specific characteristics at regional and local level.
At their informal meeting in Riga on 14 April, the Ministers of the Environment of the Twenty-Eight stressed the need to improve the implementation of the existing legislation in order to protect biodiversity and include the concerns related to biodiversity in other sectorial policies (see EUROPE 11294). The NGOs fear that this health check will be a pretext to water down the requirements of a unique legislation which is extremely important to nature protection.
The questionnaire is available online in 23 languages:
https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/EUNatureDirectives (Aminata Niang)