As this European Parliament term began, Fridays for Future school strikes, inspired by Greta Thunberg, were sweeping Europe, with young people demanding that political leaders act decisively against climate change’s mortal threat. 

Five years on, as the parliament entered its final chapter, very different protests erupted in Brussels and across Europe – this time led by farmers, who clashed with police and brought the city to gridlock. The farmers’ grievances were many, from rising energy and fertiliser costs, to cheap imports and environmental rules.  

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Just as Fridays for Future signified growing pressure on politicians to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, the farmers’ protests have been seen as a stark warning of the rural backlash against doing so. 

In reality, the reasons for the farmers’ anger are more diffuse.     

Climate and forests centre-stage 

In the early days of the current parliament, the school strikers’ message appeared to be getting through. Tackling climate change was  “this generation’s defining task”, the European Commission declared. Within 100 days of taking office, the new Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met her manifesto promise of launching the European Green Deal. 

The following few years saw climate and forests take centre-stage in EU policymaking to an unprecedented degree: from the Climate Law, which wrote into the statutes the EU’s goal to be climate neutral by 2050, to the Nature Restoration Law (NRL), setting binding targets to bring back nature across Europe, and the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), the first legislation of its kind in the world, which aims to stop EU consumption from devastating forests around the world. 

Then came the backlash. 

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Over the past year, vested industry interests and EU member states have tried to sabotage key pieces of the European Green Deal, including the NRL and the EUDR. 

This pushback against laws to protect the natural world is now a battleground in EU parliamentary elections, with populist, far-right and centre-right parties seeing it as fertile vote-winning territory. 

The centre-right European People’s Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, has been campaigning against key planks of the Green Deal, including the NRL, while promoting itself as the defender of rural interests. 

But the views of the rural constituencies whose votes they covet are not as simplistic or polarised as widely depicted. 

Deep listening 

At Fern, we’ve increasingly worked with people who share the same forest policy goals but are bitterly opposed to one another.

This is why we commissioned the insight firm GlobeScan to run focus groups among rural communities in four highly forested countries: Czechia, France, Germany and Poland. We wanted to find out what those whose concerns have been used to justify the backlash against green laws really think. The results contradict the prevailing narrative. 

All participants – selected with a balance of genders, occupations, political views and socio-economic statuses – felt that forests should be protected by law, and unanimously rejected the idea that such protection measures are a threat to rural economic development or an assault on property rights.

They felt deeply attached to their forests, saw them as public goods, were concerned about the state of them, and had a strong sense of responsibility and ownership towards them. They also wanted to see action to improve industrial forest management practices and mitigate climate change. 

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While there was some sympathy for concerns around too much bureaucracy, even those who expressed this view felt forests should be protected by laws. Moreover, they saw the EU as having a primary role in providing support and incentives, and developing initiatives to fight the climate and biodiversity crises.  

Given how much EU politicians have put rural concerns at the heart of their arguments for rolling back the Green Deal – and are now using them in their election campaigns – it’s telling that their narratives on this do not resonate widely. Even foresters with right-leaning political views saw most of them as extreme and oversimplified. 

The lesson here is that the simplistic, divisive arguments that dominate the public debate over rural people and laws to protect nature do not reflect the complex reality of peoples’ lives or their attitudes. Where a divide exists between those pushing for strong laws to protect nature and the rural communities supposedly resisting them, it’s far from irreconcilable. 

Bridging any such gaps by listening and understanding each other’s perspectives is vital for all our futures. Those elected to the next EU Parliament would be wise to heed this. 

For further information, see: Rural Perspectives on Forest Protection 

The post Right-wing pushback on EU’s green laws misjudges rural views  appeared first on Climate Home News.

They have also, say observers, triggered a response unparalleled in the history of the politics around climate change: the setting of international red lines on environmental destruction. For President Macron and others, the fires tearing through the world’s largest tract of rainforest are an outrage that can’t be ignored.

All humanity will suffer if the devastation continues, yet it is Brazilians – and above all the one million indigenous people who call the Amazon home – who are bearing the brunt of this crisis right now.

In all the analysis of the fires’ causes, and the (rightful) opprobrium heaped on the Bolsonaro government for paving the way for it by, among other things, systematically weakening environmental laws, one thing has been largely overlooked: Europeans’ complicity in helping create this catastrophe.

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After all, what we’re witnessing in the Amazon is just the latest chapter in a tragedy that’s been unfolding for years – one which is driven, to a large degree, by external demand for agricultural produce.

The Amazon fires were started by landholders to improve grass cover in cattle pastures, or to burn felled trees in preparation for crops and pasture. They are acting to help meet the insatiable demand for beef and – indirectly – soy in Europe, as well as in China, whose meat industry, like the EU’s, relies on huge quantities of soybean animal feed to raise livestock.

Nineteen percent of all soy consumed in the EU comes from Brazil, and 10% of all Brazilian beef is destined for the EU. Along with environmental devastation, these industries are also responsible for land grabs, social conflict and are rife with exploitative practices. Although there have been constraints on soy production expansion in the Amazon, this has only increased pressure from cattle farming there. As pastureland in the Cerrado savannah has been replaced with soybean plantations, ranchers have headed to the Amazon, causing nearly a quarter of the total annual deforestation in some years.

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It would horrify many EU citizens to know that they are unwitting accomplices to the shocking scenes unfolding on social media and their television screens. Yet there are concrete steps their governments can take to end this, which a number of NGOs, including Fern, have outlined in a letter to EU leaders this week.

First, as president Macron, Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar and others have suggested, the EU should formally suspend ratifying its recently concluded Free Trade Agreement with the Mercosur countries, which include Brazil. At the time it was agreed, Fern and many others warned that it would exacerbate the threat to the planet.

The deal should not be signed or ratified until it contains strong and binding safeguards that will ensure that forests are protected, and indigenous and traditional communities’ rights are respected.

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Second, the EU should enact legislation ensuring that companies and the finance sector are required to do due diligence guaranteeing that the goods they place on the EU market, as well as their investments, have not caused forest degradation or deforestation, or led to human rights abuses.

On July 23, the European Commission released a communication committing itself to measures to “increase supply chain transparency and minimise the risk of deforestation and forest degradation associated with commodity imports in the EU.”

As the Amazon burns, the urgency for the commission to meet this commitment only intensifies. This must be done in partnership with, not imposed on, forested countries.

In doing so, Europe’s leaders will not only fulfil the wishes of the bulk of their own citizens (a recent poll showed that 87% of Europeans support new laws to ensure that the food they eat and the products they buy don’t drive global deforestation), but help protect the rights of the Brazilians currently on the frontline of today’s devastation.

Hannah Mowat is campaign coordinator at the forests and rights NGO, Fern.

The post Europeans must face their own role in the destruction of the Amazon appeared first on Climate Home News.