The environmental association Zero warned today that Portugal must review the National Plan for Nature Restoration (PNRN) before sending it to Brussels, because approving it as it stands would be “committing it from the outset.”
In a statement marking National Nature Conservation Day, which is observed on Tuesday, the association lays out six proposed changes to the Plan, not denying that it is an important instrument and “a historic opportunity to transform restoration into a true policy of the State with legal force”.
The association argues that the PNRN should include an annual execution report, targeted measures and not vague ones; there should be a single entity responsible for the Plan and not “diffuse competencies”; there should be an executing authority, and there should be a multiannual state budget commitment and an inventory of environmentally harmful subsidies.
A restoration plan is not executed “with good intentions, but with dates, maps, responsible parties and funding”, which this PNRN does not have, says Zero.
It is not known whether it is functioning, because the first execution report is only planned to be produced in six years; of the 406 measures 58% (237) are “national” and without a defined location, none of the 406 measures has a responsible entity or an estimated cost associated, the form of governance is yet to be defined, and of the 500 million euros announced annually there are, according to Zero, only 168.7 million.
In other words, to sum up, the PNRN’s diagnosis is correct and Portugal knows what to restore and why, but the concrete measures are missing.
On Tuesday’s anniversary, Zero notes in the statement that on July 28, 1948 the Iberian Peninsula’s oldest environmental association, the Liga para a Proteção da Natureza, was established, then created to defend Mata do Solitário in the Serra da Arrábida (the Park was created in 1976).
And it warns that between the classification of an area on paper and its effective on-the-ground management there has always been “a persistent distance”. It is this distance between plan and result that Zero fears to see repeated in the PNRN.
Zero notes that the deadlines to designate Special Areas of Conservation and publish their respective management plans ended in 2012 and were not met, that in 2019 the Court of Justice of the European Union condemned the country, and that the European Commission condemned Portugal to pay a fine that by last summer was already around 100 million euros.
The PNRN must be sent by Portugal to Brussels in September next. It is open for public consultation on the Participa Portal until August 19.
