On 22 June 2022, the European Commission published a legislative proposal for a nature restoration law. While this proposal contains many welcome measures, such as curbing the use of pesticides, it also puts forward very worrying proposals to put a price on nature, to base critical conservation on short-term cost-benefit analyses, and to set up market-based schemes to trade biodiversity offsets.
This is no surprise, as the European Commission has been promoting biodiversity offsetting since 2010. Yet, while restoration is indispensable, financing it via market-based mechanisms would severely undermine its environmental integrity and foster destroying to restore.