An evaluation of protected area policies in the EU
February 22, 2024 Economie
Article published onVox.eu CEPR on February 16th 2024
An evaluation of protected area policies in the EU
The EU is currently one of the regions closest to reaching the COP15 goal of protecting 30% of the global land area by 2030, with over 25% of its land area protected in 2020. However, the analysis in this column indicates that member states appear to have protected land that was at minimal threat of economic development, such as areas that had already been left to nature or land recently abandoned by agriculture. The historical trend of plucking the low-hanging fruit when deciding which areas to protect suggests that the EU’s recent greening objectives are less ambitious than they first appear.
The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity concluded with an intention to protect 30% of the global land area by 2030. This makes land protection the primary instrument of governments’ efforts to restore biodiversity. Furthermore, land protection promises to alleviate deforestation pressure, build resilience to natural disasters, or even provide a space for recreation (Villeneuve and Grislain-Letrémy 2022). Currently the EU is one of the regions closest to meeting the ‘30x30’ goal, with over 25% of its land area protected in 2020.
Scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of land protection for increasing biodiversity is growing, with particular attention paid to the benefits of protection in the Brazilian Amazon (Pfaff 2015, Assunc̡ão et al. 2022). This includes research stressing how the EU's trade policy with Brazil can help combat deforestation in the tropics (Harstad 2023). However, in our recent paper (Grupp et al. 2023) we note that the literature has not yet paid much attention to protection policies in the EU and the US. We thus aim to plug this research gap with respects to the EU, specifically examining the EU’s domestic land use policies – some of the most ambitious and comprehensive protection policies globally - and their performance.
Land use in the EU
Land-use dynamics in the EU to date have been very different from those in the Amazon. Europe has greened substantially over the last century. Since 1990, the EU has gained an area of forest equal to the size of Portugal. Moreover, this trend is not confined to the last three decades. The Historic Land Dynamics Assessment (HILDA) reveals that the percentage of land covered by forests increased from just over 20% in 1900 to nearly 35% of the EU's land area in 2020 with a substantial forest gain in each decade since the 1940s...
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