The European Commission has adopted an ambitious new strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the EU by 2020. There are six main targets, and 20 actions to help Europe reach its goal. Biodiversity loss is an enormous challenge in the EU, with around one in four species currently threatened with extinction and 88% of fish stocks over-exploited or significantly depleted.

The six targets cover:

1. Full implementation of EU nature legislation to protect biodiversity
2. Better protection for ecosystems, and more use of green infrastructure
3. More sustainable agriculture and forestry
4. Better management of fish stocks
5. Tighter controls on invasive alien species
6. A bigger EU contribution to averting global biodiversity loss.
    

The strategy is in line with two commitments made by EU leaders in March 2010. The first is the 2020 headline target: "Halting the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020, and restoring them in so far as feasible, while stepping up the EU contribution to averting global biodiversity loss"; the second is the 2050 vision: “By 2050, European Union biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides – its natural capital – are protected, valued and appropriately restored for biodiversity's intrinsic value and for their essential contribution to human wellbeing and economic prosperity, and so that catastrophic changes caused by the loss of biodiversity are avoided.”

It is also in line with global commitments made in Nagoya in October 2010, in the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity, where world leaders adopted of a package of measures to address global biodiversity loss over the coming decade.

The new Biodiversity Strategy follows on from the 2006 Biodiversity Action Plan.

Further information

• Communication from the Commission: Our life insurance, our natural capital: an EU biodiversity strategy to 2020 (COM(2011) 244)
• This news item is taken from text on the EC website, from which additional accompanying documents may be obtained