Conservation: More important than climate protection

The outlook on climate is bleak. Just this past July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) interpreted the Paris Climate Agreement and human rights law in such a way that global warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to prevent at least the worst outcomes. As recent calculations using the latest climate data have shown, industrialized nations have already exhausted their carbon budget by that measure. And yet the issue is receiving less and less attention. What is frequently overlooked, however, is this: the accelerating extinction of species — a process that has been gathering pace since industrialization — is an even more dire situation.

In terms of biodiversity and ecosystem loss, the planetary boundaries — the scientifically recognized thresholds for the safe continuation of human existence — have been exceeded even more dramatically than in the case of climate change. This threatens the physical foundations of all human freedom and, with it, human rights, particularly the rights to life and health. For without intact ecosystems, soil regeneration, functioning pollination, and functioning freshwater cycles, human existence is imperiled in the long run.

Conservation is therefore not a feel-good issue we can afford to set aside in times of economic and geopolitical crisis. Conservation is also an economic factor. It is scientifically undisputed that biodiversity loss threatens to become many times more costly than effective nature protection would be. Without the fundamental services nature provides — water purification, pollination, and the like — humanity could not survive. Artificially substituting these services is, in some cases, simply not possible or else prohibitively expensive. As with the climate issue, the real expense lies not in addressing the problem but in failing to do so.

And yet, in the EU, in Germany, and elsewhere, we protect nature only in a piecemeal fashion. Policy is in fact accelerating the loss of species and ecosystems by permitting — and often even subsidizing — factory farming, pesticides, and excess fertilization. The EU is currently going so far as to exempt farmers from the already limited environmental requirements, even though conventional agriculture is a central driver of biodiversity loss. The majority of agricultural land use serves the production of animal foodstuffs, meaning that biodiversity loss is largely attributable to intensive livestock farming. 

Agricultural law nonetheless permits animal husbandry in practically unlimited quantities, including the associated excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides for animal feed.

Where European and German agricultural policy has so far promoted and permitted the destruction of nature, this can only be partially offset through conservation law designating certain areas or species for special protection. This is all the more true given that conservation law is frequently poorly enforced, and the federal government is currently seeking to curtail nature protection even further.

It is certainly welcome that the EU adopted the so-called Nature Restoration Law in 2024. In theory, it is meant to finally halt biodiversity loss and partially restore degraded nature. The regulation establishes binding targets for the restoration of nature across various ecosystems and requires member states to develop corresponding plans. This could, for the first time, represent a meaningful step in the right direction — but only if the regulation's targets are substantially specified and consistently implemented. The regulation sets timelines that are far too long, ultimately extending to 2050. Moreover, it is riddled with loopholes, and the concrete measures by which it is to be implemented remain entirely unclear. Most troubling of all: Christian Democratic parties in the EU and in Germany have been working for months to have the regulation repealed entirely.

All of this also contradicts the 2021 ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court, which held that policy may not simply shift problems one-sidedly into the future. For this reason, for the first time in the world, a lawsuit demanding more effective conservation legislation was filed before a supreme court — the German Federal Constitutional Court — at the end of 2024. Drawing on human rights grounds, it calls on the court to compel the Bundestag — or indirectly the EU — to establish a comprehensive statutory framework for biodiversity protection. The model is the successful constitutional climate complaint of 2018, which prevailed in court in 2021.

One might object at this point that climate and biodiversity are in conflict — for instance, in the case of wind energy, which can harm certain bird species. This is true, however, only for specific locations and specific species, and the damage to wildlife it causes is far less than that caused, say, by airports. Furthermore, climate change itself is one of the primary drivers of biodiversity loss. And factory farming, for example, damages both the climate and biodiversity alike. Nor should we forget that intact natural ecosystems — near-natural forests and peatlands, for instance — also store enormous quantities of greenhouse gases.

If we commit, for example, to a significant reduction in livestock farming and to a more determined response to climate change in general, then nature protection and climate protection go hand in hand. In any case, it would be too narrow to conceive of conservation primarily as the protection of individual species rather than of ecosystems across entire landscapes, including agricultural ones. Limiting the major sources of harm — such as pesticides and animal husbandry — through systems like emissions trading is also more likely to find public acceptance than relying solely on prohibitions and costly subsidies to achieve conservation goals.

What is pointless, by contrast, is the currently widespread demand to grant animals, plants, or rivers their own rights independent of human interests. Nature is in constant flux and is defined by competition among species. Without human interests as a reference point, it would be entirely unclear whether to aim for the natural state of 1970, that of 1900, that prior to the Thirty Years' War, or perhaps the state following the last ice age. It is therefore essential to understand conservation as a human rights issue.

This article is also published on Die Zeit, in German. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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