Mid Sweden University

Biodiversity is continuing to decrease widely and manifold echoed calls for reversing this trend need support from more effectively formulated and implemented rules-of-law. The UN Post 2020 Biodiversity Framework to be concluded in May 2022 contains in the past and current drafts an overall vision for global net improvements till 2050 and already some goals and targets for concrete net gains. The overall goal of this contribution is to show how the EU Habitats Directive already in its current version contributes and can further contribute to such biodiversity net gains, besides the actions outlined in the 2020 EU Biodiversity Strategy also referring to the Net Gain Principle. Hermeneutic methods are applied such as comparative legal analyses and different types of text interpretation (e.g. historic, wording, rational). The findings identify three major parts of the EU-Habitats Directives where the implementation of the objective to achieve net gains can be legally based upon, namely the maintenance, the restoration and the compensation.

1. For the maintenance of habitat types which are already in a Favourable Conservation Status (FSC) the Habitat Directive defines a natural habitat also as ‘favourable’ when its natural range and areas it covers within that range is increasing (beside being stable).

2. Within the restoration of habitat types and wild species in unfavourable FSC, the Habitat Directive practically requires net gains (while the implementation and enforcement of this requirement could in the last overall assessment of the status of those habitat types and wild species not be established).

3. In the area of conservation, the implementation Habitat Directive already provides practical examples where an over-compensation towards net gains could be shown (while this does not seem to be a realistic option for all habitat types and wild species).

The results show the already current potential of the Habitats Directive to contribute through an implementation of EU’s Net Gain Principle to the overall global vision toward net improvements of the UN Post 2020 Biodiversity Framework. This can be considered as a starting point for steering the regional and global implementation of this new international policy objective enabling a sustainable development also on the EU level. The presentation has its focus on SDG 16 as it particular guides SDG 16.3. “16.3 Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all” as well as 15.5 “Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species”. It relates to the conference topic through its call for a systematic change in absolute terms of the human culture of decreasing biodiversity.