eprintid: 48372 rev_number: 17 eprint_status: archive userid: 1237 dir: disk0/00/04/83/72 datestamp: 2023-11-14 10:17:13 lastmod: 2023-11-14 10:23:23 status_changed: 2023-11-14 10:17:13 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Chapron, Guillaume creators_name: Epstein, Yaffa creators_name: Ours Ortmark, Mar creators_name: Helmius, Lovisa creators_name: Ramírez Loza, Juan Pablo creators_name: Bétaille, Julien creators_name: López-Bao, José Vicente creators_idrefppn: 089021045 creators_idrefppn: 15890432X creators_halaffid: 480303 title: European Commission may gut wolf protection ispublished: pub subjects: subjects_DROIT410 subjects: subjects_DROIT8 abstract: The recovery of the wolf in Europe is one of the rare conservation successes on the continent (1). Instrumental to this recovery has been the strict legal protection of wolves throughout most of their range under Annex IV of the Habitats Directive (2). Strict protection has prevented anti-conservation interest groups from gaining the upper hand on wolf policy. The Court of Justice of the European Union has several times given a strict interpretation of the Habitats Directive in favor of wolf conservation (3). However, less than a year after it agreed to the ambitious Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the European Commission has announced that it is considering a proposal to weaken the protection of wolves (4). This goes against a Directive “fitness check” study requested by the previous Commission, which concluded that changing annexes would be counterproductive and stressed the importance of enforcement (5). The Commission has grown increasingly reluctant to fulfill its role of enforcing legal obligations for wolf conservation. It has failed to take action to prevent the repeated violations of EU law by Sweden for more than a decade (6) and has passively watched a wolf population disappear in Spain (7). It is now considering putting forward “a proposal to modify, where appropriate, the status of protection of the wolf,” (4) presumably by moving the species from Annex IV to Annex V of the Habitats Directive, as demanded by farmer, landowner, and hunter organizations (8). In some areas, wolves are already classified in Annex V, under which wolf killing does not need to be justified. In practice, Annex V listing means that there is very little oversight from the EU. The protection of Annex V species has sometimes been treated as optional. Finland, for instance, has for years considered Annex V listing of its wolves in the northern part of the country as a license to nearly eradicate them (9). Although wolves under Annex V still need to have Favourable Conservation Status (FCS), as under Annex IV, the contentiousness of what constitutes FCS would leave ample room for Member States to set it at the lowest possible population size for political reasons. This is already the case in Sweden, where the government instructed its Environmental Protection Agency to set FCS to between 170 and 270 wolves (10). A change in wolf protection would in practice mean far fewer restrictions on the killing of wolves in Europe, which is why Sweden and Austria have recently asked the Commission to implement it (11). Under Article 19 of the Habitats Directive, however, a change in wolf protection requires the unanimity of all 27 Member States (12). Conservationists in Europe therefore need to find a single unsupportive government to veto undoing decades of wolf recovery. date: 2023-10-20 date_type: published publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science id_number: 10.1126/science.adk7686 faculty: droit divisions: IEJUC keywords: Wolf keywords: European Commission keywords: Conservation french_keywords: Loup french_keywords: Commission européenne french_keywords: Conservation language: en has_fulltext: TRUE view_date_year: 2023 full_text_status: restricted publication: Science volume: vol.382 number: n°6668 place_of_pub: New York pagerange: 275-275 refereed: TRUE issn: 0036-8075 harvester_local_overwrite: eprintid harvester_local_overwrite: userid harvester_local_overwrite: faculty harvester_local_overwrite: dir harvester_local_overwrite: site harvester_local_overwrite: type harvester_local_overwrite: creators_name harvester_local_overwrite: number harvester_local_overwrite: date harvester_local_overwrite: keywords harvester_local_overwrite: pagerange harvester_local_overwrite: date_type harvester_local_overwrite: volume harvester_local_overwrite: french_keywords harvester_local_overwrite: refereed harvester_local_overwrite: divisions harvester_local_overwrite: abstract harvester_local_overwrite: title harvester_local_overwrite: publication harvester_local_overwrite: publish_to_hal harvester_local_overwrite: language harvester_local_overwrite: subjects harvester_local_overwrite: issn harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: ispublished harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: creators_halaffid harvester_local_overwrite: publisher harvester_local_overwrite: id_number harvester_local_overwrite: place_of_pub harvester_local_overwrite: hal_id harvester_local_overwrite: hal_version harvester_local_overwrite: hal_url harvester_local_overwrite: hal_passwd site: ut1 publish_to_hal: TRUE hal_id: hal-04284176 hal_passwd: s04du5u@ hal_version: 1 hal_url: https://hal.science/hal-04284176 citation: Chapron, Guillaume , Epstein, Yaffa, Ours Ortmark, Mar, Helmius, Lovisa, Ramírez Loza, Juan Pablo, Bétaille, Julien and López-Bao, José Vicente (2023) European Commission may gut wolf protection. Science, vol.382 (n°6668). p. 275. document_url: https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/48372/1/chapron%20et%20al.%20-%2048372.pdf