Since May last year, we’ve been campaigning to save the EU Nature Directives – vital laws that protect our most vulnerable wildlife and places – from being weakened as they undergo a review.
Our campaigning is working: we’ve made huge progress and the language being used by UK and European politicians is shifting increasingly away from opening or ‘merging’ (political code for weakening) these crucial laws and towards putting them into practice properly instead. That’s thanks to your support, and that of thousands like you across the rest of Europe.
But we've not won yet. The EU's review of the Nature Directives is still in progress, but for the first time our MEPs have an opportunity to speak up and defend the laws that protect our nature with us. It's time to ask them to officially support the EU Nature Directives.
In the first week of February at their next regular voting session, MEPs will debate and vote on a key report on what still needs to be done to halt and reverse the loss of our wildlife by 2020. The evidence shows clearly that the Nature Directives are our most effective tool to do that, and without them any chance of meeting the 2020 target would be scuppered. The report, prepared by the cross-Party Environment Committee, opposes changes to the Nature Directives for this reason.
A crucial moment to send a message
The vote is a chance for the whole Parliament to make a crystal clear statement in support of the laws that protect nature by adopting the report as their official position.
We want to make sure our UK MEPs know we’d like to see them defend nature. Over 100,500 UK citizens spoke up for the Nature Directives in the European Commission’s consultation last year, and our MEPs are our elected representatives in Europe.
Email your MEP and urge them to vote to adopt the report as the Parliament’s official position
We've already come a long way
Achieving the biggest ever response to an EU consultation last summer (more than half a million European citizens responded!) made a big impact on European politicians and policy-makers. Before Christmas we wrote to our MPs backing UK Environment Minister Rory Stewart to defend nature too, and it clearly had a positive impact. The actions we took as individuals joined those of thousands of other people across the continent. Together we’ve already secured support for the Nature Directives from:
So let's get our MEPs, who represent us, to speak up and defend nature too!
Catch up on the story of the campaign:The Defend Nature campaign web pagePrevious Defend Nature blogs