National Legal Mechanisms to Fund Ecosystem Restoration

The financing of nature restoration is under pressure. For example, in the Flanders Region, under the current Flemish government, subsidies for NGOs to purchase land for management as nature reserves have been cut by 75%, and no additional budget has been allocated for the implementation of the European Nature Restoration Law. It is therefore pivotal to explore legal mechanisms that can generate funding for ecosystem restoration.

In this contribution, I aim to examine:

• first, several new as well as established instruments in nature conservation legislation in various Western European countries that provide financial resources for nature conservation. For instance, the German Eingriffsregelung obliges developers to offset biodiversity loss either in kind or, where this is not possible, through monetary compensation; in France, a 1% tax is levied on construction works that is used for the state to acquire (mostly) coastal areas, which are in general expensive; and in Flanders, a system has been developed to value species and ecosystems, called Bioval, so that offenders must pay for the societal damage they cause;

• second, potential synergies with emerging instruments in land-use legislation aimed at compensating land take by “unsealing” other areas and converting them into natural or agricultural land; this fits within the European Union’s objective of achieving net zero land take by 2050;

• third, the role of the judiciary in compelling governments to restore ecosystems. For example, in Belgium a 2025 judgment obliges the Flemish Region to restore the habitat of the common wild hamster, after the species had become nearly extinct in the region, this implies of course that the state must also finance it.

  I want to conclude with some recommendations for NGO’s as well as governmental bodies, based upon this research.