Don’t let the EU tear down nature protection.

The European Commission wants to roll back vital environmental protections – and they’re asking for your opinion. We have until 10 September to speak up before it’s too late. 

Tell them to keep their hands off nature.

Across Europe, nature is already struggling. Forests are thinning, rivers are drying, wildlife is vanishing. We’re losing clean air, safe water, and the green spaces we rely on. And now, the Commission wants to weaken the very laws meant to protect nature and people.

Some decision-makers call it “simplification” or “cutting red tape”, when in truth it’s dismantling our key environmental protections, one by one. What’s actually being simplified is the path for those who want to profit from the destruction of nature at everyone’s expense.

And they are doing it quietly, when most people are away. In the middle of the summer, the European Commission launched a so-called ‘Call for Evidence’, asking companies, organisations and citizens whether EU environmental laws should be weakened. 

This is your chance to speak up.

Write your message via clicking this link to tell decision-makers you oppose weakening and removing nature laws.

It took decades of our collective voices to build the laws that protect people and nature. Don’t let them be undone in silence. 

You have until 10 September to make your voice heard - make it count!

Please note that your submission will be public on the Commission’s website.

Some background: this change is coming about as the European Commission has opened up a consultation seeking to 'simplify' and 'streamline' certain European Legislation to make it easier for companies who are bound by this legislation to comply with the rules. While on the face of it, this sounds reasonable, we know from their recent track record that 'simplification' means reducing ambition, to make it easier for industry to continue polluting. 

We've seen it with the Omnibus legislation, which has already exempted most companies from sustainability reporting and waters down due diligence rules; in agriculture, simplification of the CAP gutted decades of progress in environmental conditionality and totally exempted some farmers from environmental standards.

The Commission's Multi-annual Financial Framework and Common Agricultural Policy proposals have gone further again removing any ring-fenced funding for the environment and doing away with LIFE, the only dedicated fund for Nature, all in the name of simplification.

We know that many industries are mobilising in support of this initiative, and we need as many voices as possible to mobilise against it, to ensure we keep our current standard of environmental protection. This comes at a time when we've just seen the biggest fish kill in the history of the State in the Blackwater River in Cork, with the ongoing environmental disaster that is Lough Neagh, and Lady's Island Lake in Wexford which is dying in plain sight on foot of agricultural pollution.

We need stronger environmental legislation and better enforcement as these issues come more and more to the fore, not weakening in the name of simplification. An Taisce relies on strong legislation to hold decision makers and industry to account, without strong laws we lose our ability to do the job we do, trying to protect our environment.  

We've faced similar challenges to EU legislative weakening in the past and massive public mobilisation prevented it, let's try do the same again this time.