The European Commission’s fitness check of European Union (EU) nature legislation is now well-advanced, with a report expected out early next year. Simon Trahair-Davies, partner at Stephens Scown, looks at the progress of the project to date, and what the signs may be from an aggregates industry perspective
The European Commission is now well along the path of conducting a ‘fitness check’ of EU nature legislation, the outcome of which is likely to be of interest to anyone connected to the aggregates and mining industries.
It’s worth remembering that conservation/environmental legislation is not being singled out here: the Commission has reviewed the “entire stock” of EU legislation and, as part of its Smart Regulation policy, is conducting fitness checks in many different areas of legislation that look at the whole policy cycle: from the design of a piece of legislation to implementation, enforcement, evaluation and, where justified, revision.
Early in 2014, the Commission published its mandate for a fitness check of the EU Birds and Habitats directives. The key components of this were to establish the directives’ effectiveness (are they meeting their objectives?); efficiency (are the costs involved reasonable?); coherence (do they fit with other legislation?); relevance (are they still necessary?), and value-add (could the objectives be achieved with only regional or national legislation, or does EU legislation bring clear added value?).
This year, the rate of activity has accelerated. January to April 2015 saw an ‘evidence-gathering’ phase in which the Commission consulted with representatives from national stakeholder groups and followed this up with a series of face-to-face meetings in order to gather and examine evidence in more detail.
The UK bodies the Commission consulted were the RSPB, Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and DECC (Department of Energy & Climate Change).
In May, the Commission published its State of Nature report, which I discuss in more detail below.
Meanwhile, the Commission also ran a public consultation survey which was open from the end of April to the end of July, asking for views from all interested parties (including members of the public) on current nature legislation.
After this flurry of activity, the Commission is expected to publish its final report early in 2016.
So, what signs are there in terms of the direction of travel so far?
The best window we have to date is the State of Nature in the EU report, which was published towards the end of May. The report covered the period 2007-2012 and was the result of “an unprecedented level of collaboration between the Member States and European institutions” drawing on a “unique database” comprising some 17,000 data-sets and assessments of individual species and habitats.
The results might best be described as a “mixed picture” as the Commission put it. On the one hand, the report found that the majority of birds have “secure status”, and some species and habitats are “doing better”.
However, 17% of bird species are still threatened and 15% are near-threatened, declining or depleted. This includes such species as the once-common Skylark and Black Tailed Godwit. Over half of other species protected under the Habitats Directive have an “unfavourable status”, while only 16% of habitats have a favourable status.
The report concludes that “much stronger conservation efforts” are needed if the EU’s 2020 biodiversity targets are to be achieved. These targets are essentially to halt the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems.
But what of the aggregates and related industries in all this? The report includes an analysis of the chief “pressures and threats” to species and habitats. And the good news from an aggregates point of view is that “mining, quarrying and energy production” ranked relatively low on the pressures and threats scale. Agriculture and forestry were, by some considerable distance, ranked as the two biggest industry threats. That said, the somewhat catch-all categories of “modifications of natural conditions”, “disturbances due to human activities” and “pollution” were also prominent. But nevertheless, mining and quarrying were not seen as dominant threats specifically.
The fact remains that the report clearly concludes that more needs to be done. The extent to which this conclusion influences the outcome of the fitness check as a whole remains to be seen.
We could get a clearer view of this in late October this year when a dedicated conference is being held in Brussels to discuss the “draft results” of the fitness check.
Beyond that, we will have to wait for publication of the final report early next year to see whether there are any likely implications for the aggregates and mining industries in Europe.
Simon Trahair-Davies is a partner in the mining and minerals team at Stephens Scown LLP in the UK. The firm has more than 70 years’ experience representing mining and minerals clients and its specialist team has recently been recognised once again by independent guides to the law Legal 500 and Chambers.
Simon can be contacted on +44 (0)1872 265100 or email [email protected]. For more information visit
