On Monday, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne unveiled a new 2030 Biodiversity Strategy under which France will put 10 per cent of its territory under “robust protection” to halt the gradual destruction of plant and animal life, Euractiv reports.
The strategy, which has been awaited for two years, includes a number of measures to protect and restore natural terrestrial and marine areas. Borne announced:
The collapse of living things is an existential threat to our societies. To stem it and reverse the trend, we are adopting a national biodiversity strategy for 2030. Our ambition is clear: to anchor the ecological transition in everyday life.
The strategy builds on the EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, which calls for effective protection of 30 per cent of land and oceans, restoration of 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems and a 50 per cent reduction in pesticide use, and the Kunming-Montreal agreement reached at COP15 on biodiversity in December. The prime minister added:
The collapse of biodiversity is so strong, so rapid and so widespread that a sixth extinction is looming (…) In short, the collapse of biodiversity is an existential threat to our societies. We must halt it quickly and reverse the trend.
France ranks sixth in the world in terms of the number of species at risk of extinction. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (IPBES), one million animal and plant species worldwide are threatened with extinction and three out of four terrestrial ecosystems are considered degraded.
Of the 40 measures proposed in the French strategy, the government wants to increase the area of France’s territories under “robust protection” from less than 5 per cent today to 10 per cent by 2030.
Another important milestone in marine environmental protection is the government’s target to fully protect overseas marine areas and mainland glaciers by 2030, whereas today these areas are only 60 per cent protected. Other measures include halving light pollution and reducing exposure to pesticides, combating land reclamation, plastic and underwater noise pollution, and banning imports of products that contribute to deforestation abroad.
Nature restoration is central to the strategy, as the European Union has just adopted a law on nature restoration, aiming to restore 30 per cent of degraded land and marine areas by 2030.
To achieve this goal, France plans to plant 50,000 kilometres of hedgerows and create 50,000 hectares of wetlands. A total of 120,000 hectares of natural areas will be restored annually, halving the rate of degradation.
The government is promising an “unprecedented” €1bn budget in 2024 to implement these measures, an increase of €250m on the previous year. To “strengthen these actions”, 141 jobs will be created in government departments and the powers of 1,700 public environmental inspectors will be expanded.
The strategy, presented in outline last July, has been criticised for being “partial and incomplete” in terms of ambitious targets, notably by the National Biodiversity Committee, which brings together 150 scientists, local authorities and non-governmental organisations.
The president of the French League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) also questioned Environment Minister Christophe Béchu about the “grey areas” associated with allowing “hunting, fishing, wind power and photovoltaic installations” in specially protected areas. He warned:
These areas must be protected.
Béchu emphasised that this is France’s third strategy on the issue and the most “ambitious” in terms of human and budgetary resources. He said at the end of the talks:
It is impossible to please everyone.
“More than ever, we need to preserve nature and not put everything under a bell,” he insisted, criticising “those who always ask for more and those who always ask for less” – who, according to him, voted against the text on nature restoration in the European Parliament.
