Feedback EU joins statement of 145 civil society organisations on the rollback of EU’s green rules
It is less than one month until the European elections, and one thing is for certain: so much is at stake.
Our society’s relationship with the nature that sustains it is fundamentally broken. Despite the growing evidence of looming ecological collapse and the alarming acceleration of the climate crisis, European governments and EU politicians are currently blocking new measures to protect nature and tearing up ones already in place.
Healthy nature underpins our ability to feed ourselves, to have clean water to drink, clean air to breathe and a safe climate to live in. We are horrified that so many politicians across Europe are threatening the basis of life on this planet to provide false solutions to farmers’ hardships, while doing nothing to address farmers’ complaints of abusive practices in the supply chain or unfair competition and cheap imports from trade deals. And all this as an opportunistic attempt to gather a few more votes in the upcoming elections.
The European Environment Agency has warned that the continent is woefully underprepared for the impacts of a changing climate. Natural ecosystems that protect us from the worst of extreme weather, drought, heatwaves and floods are disappearing when we should be restoring them.
In recent months, Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has loosened pollution rules for industrial farms, dropped plans for sustainable food production, abandoned targets to reduce pesticides and shelved efforts to ensure a resilient water supply. Some national governments have frozen EU plans to restore nature in Europe and compromised corporate due diligence rules protecting human rights and the environment. Now, the European Commission wants to scrap basic environmental standards for farms to appease industry lobbyists, and agriculture ministers are threatening the EU’s new rules to fight global deforestation.
Nature is not in conflict with our society’s ability to thrive, it is the very foundation of it. But some politicians in European capitals, and in the EU institutions in Brussels, are accelerating the nature and climate crisis, and risking the lives of the people they represent. We urge you to stop before it is too late.