EU member States backed on Wednesday 25th of September a proposal from the European Commission to downgrade the protection status of the wolf in Europe.
The species, currently classified as “strictly protected” will be downgraded to “protected”. This decision has raised the concern that all the conservation efforts made during the past years can be put in jeopardy. According to the EC, this change in status will “grant member states more flexibility” to authorise trapping and culling of the wolves if they are likely to threaten livestock, health or safety.
When will this be implemented?
The European Commission’s proposal was adopted on Wednesday, September 25th, backed by a qualified majority of 27 EU member states during a meeting of COREPER – the Committee of Permanent Representatives, which brings together EU ambassadors. The decision was confirmed on the 26th with a vote in Competitiveness Council. The next step will take place on December 2nd, when the EU will request a change to the wolf’s protection status at the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife meeting (it was under the 1979 Bern Convention that the wolf was originally designated as a “strictly protected” species). If the amendment is accepted, the Commission will then present a new proposal to revise the EU’s Habitat Directive.
We asked experts in our community to comment on the situation. What will be the real impact of this downgrade and what actions should be taken in the future?
According to experts from the CETAF consortium, it is merely a political decision, not based on scientific evidence, and disregarding the in-depth analysis requested by the European Commission on the situation of the wolf in the European Union. Professor Roman Gula, from the Museum & Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, adds that current regulations regarding wolves are “already very flexible”, so each state that would like to implement some degree of wolf control can do it by obtaining a derogation from the Habitat Directive and so he mark it as a “strictly political decision”.
Other experts from our community are convinced that the scientific evidence emerging from the in-depth analysis presented by the European Commission does not back the decision.
With the downgrading of the wolf’s status, monitoring will be even more crucial, since the policies will be implemented at local level. “What I fear the most is that countries will invest less in monitoring, whereas it is more needed than ever, as it is the only sentinel left to warn about eventual declines, overhunting or other management errors”, says Joachim Mergeay from the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) of Flandres, “We can not ignore the success of the conservation of the wolves. Their numbers raised consistently in some areas while in others they are still struggling – but the point is to include criteria of ecological functionality and not stick exclusively to numbers.”
That’s exactly one of the points that will become evident when implementing the EU Nature Restoration Law into national legislation: the NRL is about a functional ecosystem and should be respected.