When I’m feeling low, tired or just fed up that advocacy for wild birds is a constant uphill struggle with few wins, I know that a walk in nature or just watching the antics of the birds in my garden really helps bring down the anxiety levels. A recent walk in a wet woodland in my new home county of Co. Laois was perceptibly calming after about 30 minutes of being surrounded by greenery and damp silence. It was magic.
At BirdWatch Ireland, we have to be ever-vigilant though to the threats to wild birds and the laws that protect them. We are involved in the European-wide Hands Off Nature campaign, which is pushing back on plans by the European Commission and Member States to weaken environmental laws at EU level.
So, if you see an email from me asking you to sign a petition telling the Commission to keep its ‘Hands Off Nature”, please sign it. Also, don’t forget to tell your politicians regularly that nature is important to you.
The EU Green Deal is a European policy that was agreed by leaders only six years ago to address environmental problems and the economy in a progressive way. To wrest back control, some politicians have portrayed the EU Green Deal, climate action and environmental laws as obstacles to economic progress and security. These voices attacking the Green Deal include some of Europe’s biggest lobbying groups, including the chemical industry and agriculture lobby
While European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen has said that she stands by the EU Green Deal, what is happening in practice is that she is proposing a systematic weakening of environmental laws. The language used to promote this is ‘simplification’ and ‘deregulation’.
A mega-bill to weaken different environmental laws has been recently proposed in Brussels. There have also been new laws created to weaken the environmental conditions European farmers have to meet for the €330 billion in funding they receive from taxpayers under the Common Agriculture Policy. So far, the Irish government has chosen not to make these changes. Many Irish farmers are doing so much good for nature, and this would not send the right message.
Recently, we saw that EU business lobbyists published a handbook of all the laws they want to see weakened, including the Water Framework Directive, which provides a framework of protection for rivers, lakes and drinking water. The attacks are real and industries appear to be going for the jugular to get as much as they can out of a weakened system.
We know what happens when there’s inadequate regulation or poor implementation of laws in Ireland. Poor quality materials are used in houses and they crumble apart leaving people absolutely at their wits’ end. The appropriate materials are not used to meet fire safety standards in some apartments and people are left anxious in case a fire breaks out. Houses get built in flood plains and a flood happens. At the end of the day people suffer because of poor regulation and implementation of laws.
We are particularly concerned about threats to the EU Birds and Habitats Directives, which have been the backbone of nature protection for decades. I am convinced that it is only because of these laws – that create special safe areas for birds and require assessments of impacts to birds and other species from policies and development – that we have any nature left in Ireland.
There are constant threats to the integrity of Special Protection Areas for birds already. Roads, greenways and other developments inch closer because it is easier to chip away at nature than to negotiate with landowners. Developers and planners don’t understand the needs of wildlife.
But the laws themselves suffer from poor implementation. Inadequate funding and staffing have plagued nature conservation in Ireland. Instead of funding ecologists at every local authority, providing guidance on implementing the laws and enough funding to incentivise farmers and others to protect and restore habitats to bring populations back up, there’s a temptation now to go after the laws themselves.
I am really afraid that we’re heading for a battle to save the Birds and Habitats Directives from attack. In 2016, the then Juncker administration of the European Commission directed the Commissioner for nature, Karmenu Vella, to undertake an evaluation of these laws ‘with a view to merging them’. Over 520,000 people made their voices known then that they didn’t want this and that they wanted greater protection for nature, not less. The evaluation found that the laws were actually fit for purpose but Member States weren’t doing enough to implement them properly. And today, that’s still the case. We don’t need fewer rules for nature, we just need to implement them better.
In the last 10 years, there has been some progress to improve implementation in Ireland, but absolutely not enough. Only in the past two years has the budget for the National Parks and Wildlife Service come back to pre-financial-crash levels. This critical state entity suffered disproportionate cuts at the time and at a cost to nature and people. In a massive show of mixed messages, while the last government agreed to setting up of a €3.14 billion Climate and Nature Fund, the current government has obliterated the nature bit as the funds have been directed to other projects that don’t involve nature restoration. With no adequate funding for nature restoration and the risk of attacks on the laws that protect nature, our wild birds are in a precarious position.
Nature is not just a nice-to-have. Yes, it does help me every day to keep up my energy for this fight. But more than that, nature is essential for our economy and security. We need nature for life.
