A crunch vote in the environment committee of the European Parliament on the EU’s proposed Nature Restoration Law is due to take place this morning (Thursday, June 15).
The environment committee meeting was due to start at 8:30a.m Brussels time, which means it is already underway.
The vote on this proposed law is the seventh of nine items on the agenda for this morning’s committee meeting.
The proposal has proven to be highly controversial, mainly because it would require the rewetting of large swathes of drained peatland in Europe, with serious concerns raised by farm organisations and some politicians – both in Ireland and across the EU – that this would include farmed peatland.
The most extreme measures that have been proposed through amendments to the original law – amendments that were tabled by European Parliament political groups associated with environmentalism and ‘green’ politics – would almost certainly affect Irish farmland.
However, it has been said by a number of key figures – including Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue – that the version of the law agreed by the Council of the EU earlier this year would allow Ireland to meet peatland rewetting targets through state-owned (i.e. Bord na Móna-owned) land.
However, concerns remain among farm organisations here that even farmland adjacent to state-owned peatland could be inadvertently effected by the rewetting process on the peatland next to it.
The European Commission proposed the original Nature Restoration Law last year, after which it was put to the Council of the EU and the parliament, which together have responsibility for passing EU legislation.
The council adopted its position on the law earlier this year, while two committees in the parliament have already voted against the law, namely the agriculture committee and the fisheries committee.
The vote today in the environment committee has been regarded as being too close to call.
If the proposed law receives the support of a majority of MEPs in the committee, it will go forward to a vote in the full session of the parliament next month.
If it does not, the future of the proposal would be unclear, but it is unlikely that the full parliament would see a vote on it in its current form next month.
The European Commission has already said that it will not redraft the law. However, last week, it did move to clarify some key points that drove the concerns of the farming community.