With its European Green Deal, the European Commission, lead by Ursula von der Leyen, wants to set the EU on a path toward sustainability. One part of this is its new Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, published in May 2020. In terms of ambition and clarity, the commitments and actions contained in the strategy are not only a decisive step forward for the protection of biodiversity in the EU itself, but also set out the EU's ambition for the negotiations on the post-2020 framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Both the drafting process of this strategy and its implementation have been accompanied by a large number of proposals and demands from science, politics and society. In view of the German EU Council Presidency in 2020, the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) commissioned adelphi to evaluate this input.
In this project, adelphi analysed the proposals according to scientific criteria and evaluated them from a nature conservation perspective. adelphi also supported the negotiations on the Council conclusions on the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and on the European Court of Auditors' special report on the protection of wild pollinators in the EU.
In addition, the state of scientific and political debate on selected key issues (restoration, protected areas, agriculture, forests, governance) of the strategy was prepared for the discussions at the meeting of EU nature conservation directors organised by the Presidency. adelphi was also helping to prepare the content of a network meeting of EU nature conservation directors, organised for the first time by the German Presidency. Finally, these key issues were discussed at European workshops with a wider circle of experts and stakeholders in order to promote and support the discourse on the exact implementation of the strategy's objectives and measures.
