Recently, I got some inter­est­ing news from France: the French Assem­blée Nationale has decided upon a res­o­lu­tion on the (planned) EU No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive. For more infor­ma­tion see the arti­cle “L’assemblée Nationale pub­lie le rap­port sur l’initiative envis­agée par la Com­mis­sion européenne pour attein­dre l’objectif “Aucune perte nette de bio­di­ver­sité” (in French).

Obvi­ously, the French Assem­blée nationale has voted for a “propo­si­tion de res­o­lu­tion europeenne sur l’initiative envis­agee par la com­mis­sion europeenne pour attein­dre l’objectif “Aucune perte nette de bio­di­ver­site” (EU No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive). But I am not sure what this actu­ally means, seen that the EU No Net Loss Ini­tia­tive is to be estab­lished in 2015 only and not yet. Please fol­low the link to the Res­o­lu­tion of 14 Novem­ber 2014 of the Assem­blée nationale or see the pdf fol­low­ing: RÉSOLUTION EUROPÉENNE sur l’initiative envis­agée par la Com­mis­sion européenne pour attein­dre l’objectif Aucune perte nette de bio­di­ver­sité.

What are the impli­ca­tions of this resolution?

As I don’t know too much about the French con­text, I asked some French col­leagues to clar­ify for me what this action is good for — nation­ally and at Euro­pean level (whether this is kind of an antic­i­pated imple­men­ta­tion of a likely EU direc­tive at French national level or a strong sig­nal to the EU what the EU ini­tia­tive should look like?)

 This has led to the con­clu­sion that the Assem­blée Nationale has sent this res­o­lu­tion as a con­tri­bu­tion to the con­sul­ta­tion launched by the Euro­pean Commission.

In sum­mary, the French deputés:

• want Euro­pean envi­ron­men­tal direc­tives to be strenght­ened and the mit­i­ga­tion hier­ar­chy to be applied strictly,
• clearly say no to vol­un­tary off­sets and yes to like-for-like and on-site offsets,
• think that the con­cept of ‘pro­mot­ing mar­ket instru­ments’ should be clarified”,
• are quite reluc­tant to develop off­set mea­sures on ecosys­tem ser­vices given the dif­fi­cul­ties we still have to prop­erly eval­u­ate such services.

For the those of you, who can read and under­stand French, here’s the link to the web­page of the Assem­blée nationale includ­ing the rapporteure’s report and the pro­ceeed­ings of the debates.