Claim to be verified: During the discussions on the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, in early 2024, Dutch member of the European Parliament from the far-right European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) Bert-Jan Ruissen claimed that “too much land was reserved for nature restoration”. Like several other right wing officials, he took up the argument that conservation undermines economic stability.
Background: The Nature Restoration Regulation was a key component of the European Green Deal aimed at reversing biodiversity loss and mitigating climate change. Originally, it was expected to impose the restoration of only a part of the EU’s land and seas considered degraded, after which no further ecosystem degradation would have been allowed. The Commission tabled its proposal in 2022 with targets of “at least 20% of Europe’s marine and terrestrial land” and “30% of habitats in poor conservation status” by 2030 – followed by a 100% restoration of ecosystems in need by 2050.
Far-right politicians were not the only ones who did not welcome the file: anticipating a shift, the centre-right European People Party (EPP) started fuelling concerns about environmental policies that could threaten farmers, food supply, and economic stability. As the EU neared its Parliament’s elections in summer 2024, and the political debate started heating up, statements like that of Ruissen became the common argument for right parties to undermine the Green Deal and therefore gain votes.
As the 2024 European elections closed in, right-wing candidates wanted to move the majority away from that of 2019: quite progressive in fact, where the Greens played a crucial role for the first time, in the wake of public movements like Fridays for Future.
Dutch MEP from the far-right European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) Bert-Jan Ruissen and his peers began a series of actions aimed at, if not dismantling the Green Deal, slowing its pace on a pretence of social justice and framing it as an economic threat. Ruissen was by February 2024 shadow rapporteur in the Committee on Agriculture for the development of the Nature Restoration Regulation, known as “nature law” in the public debate.
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Because a green transition was costly and risked leaving behind those citizens whose jobs and entire lives still evolve around traditional ways of production, it should be revised and made more “pragmatic” or “realistic”, according to the far-right.
For former MEP of the European People’s Party (EPP, conservative), Marlene Mortler, who drafted a report on food security, the “Green Deal mustn’t jeopardise food security” – something she considered a potential risk as more land becomes “useless” due to protection measures.
Calling for a complete rejection of the Commission’s proposal, the EPP leader Manfred Weber said in 2023 that “the law’s objective is to restore nature back to its state of 1950”. “It challenges local and regional governments to do the impossible: turn back 70 years of changes to nature in about 25 years,” he added.
A series of unfortunate events
Opponents of the law have falsely claimed that vast areas of farmland will be rewilded.
In reality, the bill does not expropriate farmland, as it prioritises degraded ecosystems and explicitly acknowledges the need to balance conservation with economic activity. The nature law also includes flexibility mechanisms, ensuring that restoration efforts are compatible with food production and rural livelihoods.
Although opposers made the legislative procedure a painful journey, co-legislators reached a deal in a last-minute battle and signed a final act in June 2024 – just before the EU elections.
The text will oblige EU member states to restore at least 30% of habitat types covered in the bill by 2030, prioritising protected sites under the existing Natura 2000 network. Now the EU’s 27 member states have until 1 September 2026 to submit their draft national restoration plans to the Commission.
Ruissen’s claim, not supported by scientific evidence or public consultation data, was the perfect way to ruin the Green Deal’s reputation. Policy making in 2025 is still paying the price for this trend.
“As the protests spread, the agricultural lobbies and the conservative right began to exploit those squares,” said Associazione Terra!.
With a certain degree of success: last year, several bits of European legislation fell victim to such worries.
The Common agricultural policy (CAP) was modified in order to enable farmers to get EU farming subsidies even if they don’t meet the bloc’s environmental standards, known as conditionality rules.
The European Parliament rejected a text for a proposal to limit the use of pesticides.
The Regulation on Deforestation-free Products was delayed, following a push from conservative parties to water down the requirements for third parties.
Emissions from intensive farming were not equated with industrial emissions in 2040 targets.
The Farm to Fork strategy, the agri-food component of the previous mandate, should be declared dead too.
Neoliberal agricultural policies
But a closer examination at farmers’ protests, often portrayed as a direct reaction to nature restoration policies, reveals that their primary concerns lay elsewhere.
For instance, the EU-Mercosur trade agreement has the potential for lower-cost agricultural products from Latin America to disrupt the EU market.
International movement La Via Campesina pointed out that farmers in 2024 were “fed up with spending their lives working incessantly without ever getting a decent income.”
Contrary to claims that land conservation undermines economic stability, research shows – if anything – that failing to restore degraded ecosystems poses a far greater financial risk
“We have reached this point after decades of neoliberal agricultural policies and free trade agreements”, it says, “production costs have risen steadily in recent years, while prices paid to farmers have stagnated or even fallen […] Since the 1980s, various regulations that ensured fair prices for European farmers have been dismantled. The EU put all its faith in free trade agreements, which placed all the world’s farmers in competition with each other, encouraging them to produce at the lowest possible price at the cost of their own incomes and growing debt. Producing ecologically has huge benefits for the health and the planet, but it costs more for the farmers, and so to achieve the agroecological transition, agricultural markets need to be protected. Unfortunately, we were not heard.”
What data says
Contrary to claims that land conservation undermines economic stability, research shows – if anything – that failing to restore degraded ecosystems poses a far greater financial risk.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights how ecosystem degradation directly threatens agricultural productivity and food security: “observed climate change is already affecting food security through increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and greater frequency of some extreme events” and “food security will be increasingly affected by projected future climate change”.
Furthermore, continues the IPCC, “about 21–37% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to the food system”.
Taking the current food system for granted, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that there is a need to produce about 50% more food by 2050 in order to feed the increasing world population. “This would engender significant increases in GHG emissions and other environmental impacts, including loss of biodiversity,” says the IPCC.
With 2 billion people more on planet Earth, we simply can’t afford to continue living as we do. And yet, it is not a simple matter of space: only new, sustainable forms of agriculture can respond to the issues industrial agriculture created in the past few decades.
“Combining supply-side actions such as efficient production, transport, and processing with demand-side interventions such as modification of food choices, and reduction of food loss and waste, reduces GHG emissions and enhances food system resilience,” says the IPCC.
Consultancy firm PwC estimates that over 50% of global GDP is at risk due to biodiversity loss, meaning that protecting nature is an economic imperative, not a hindrance.
The World Resources Institute (WRI) has demonstrated that climate finance investment in nature restoration yields substantial economic returns and job creation.
While a vision is needed, this is something undeniably hard to propose at a time of wars and fear. Other climate policies are facing strong resistance, in the name of the status quo. It’s not by chance that the same rhetoric responsible for attacking the nature law was also behind a roll back on energy policies.
While the EU’s Renewable energy directive raised the targeted share of EU consumption of renewable energy to 42.5% by 2030, with an additional 2.5% indicative top-up that would allow the bloc to reach 45%, some expressed concerns that agriculture production was also in danger as renewables compete for available land.
But a study by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and a report published by EU power association Eurelectric said biodiversity and electric grids can co-exist without compromising on nature or food production.
Conservatives say the planet is too small for both activities that have been ruining it and those activities that are attempting to save it. They are right, but guess which ones should be abandoned?
As climate risks escalate, scientists do not consider restoring nature a luxury: they found that is a necessity. In other words, preserving and restoring ecosystems is not a threat to economic stability – it is a safeguard against future collapse.
