EU lawmakers back green bill: Law will protect nature and fight climate change
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00:00 Europe editor Armin Georgian in Strasbourg and he told us what the law sets out to accomplish.
00:05 Well, the stakes are huge here, Monty.
00:10 What the EU wants to do is to reclaim degraded land, which is we're talking dozens of millions
00:18 of hectares across Europe from semi-arid areas in Spain or Italy to depressed post-industrial
00:26 landscapes in various European countries. And the idea is to replant, reforest those
00:33 areas which could provide better soil, more carbon capture, more water retention. All
00:39 of that could help with mitigating climate change, with the impacts of climate change,
00:44 and also crucially diversifying crops so that you have different crops being grown and that
00:49 could actually increase food production overall. So this is not some distant Brussels bubble,
00:57 you know, institutional type thing. This is a measure which, if implemented competently
01:03 and well, could have a massive impact on all of our lives in Europe.
01:08 So that sounds like a really big goal. As a practical matter, what are the next steps?
01:13 Well, first of all, I have to tell you, Monty, that there's a real buzz here. It's calmed
01:19 down slightly behind me, but a few moments ago there were a lot of MEPs briefing. They
01:24 were quite exuberant. Two of them actually took off their suits and tie and stripped
01:28 down to a T-shirt which says "Restore Nature." So they're very happy that this law passed,
01:34 although not by many votes. It was really a close thing. I was speaking to one Green
01:40 MEP and I asked him, "Do you think the law has been watered down a lot by the various
01:46 amendments?" And he said, "Well, to some extent, but the most important thing is that it got
01:50 through. The EU's credibility was at stake here. The EU wants to be seen as a climate
01:56 leader. Greta Thunberg was here in Strasbourg yesterday with a group of climate activists
02:01 urging MEPs to back this law." So basically, people who wanted this to go through, they're
02:06 very happy that it did go through, even if it's not perfect, even if it's not in its
02:11 ideal form. The law was opposed by mainly two groups, the European People's Party, which
02:18 is the group of conservatives in the European Parliament, and the European Conservatives
02:23 and Reformists, or ECR, which is the hard right. And those two groups have been getting
02:28 a little bit closer together in the last few months. They were arguing that this law could
02:33 put farmers at a disadvantage, that essentially you can't impose things like the nature restoration
02:41 law or the Green New Deal without taking farmers' interests fully into account. The reason I
02:48 mention this is because there are national governments, some national governments in
02:51 the EU who share that view. So even though the EPP and the ECR were, as it were, defeated
02:58 in this vote, they do still have allies in some of the national governments. And that's
03:03 important because this process is not over yet, Monty. There are still what's called
03:07 trilogues. That's to say negotiations between the Parliament, the member states, and the
03:12 European Commission. And clearly, those European governments that are more conservative or
03:18 even hard right, in some cases, will be on the same wavelength as the EPP and the ECR
03:24 and will want to further water down this law, presumably, or reject it, or find a way to
03:30 kind of reverse, to some extent, what the Parliament has just done here.