Environment ministry aims to classify nature-based climate action as “overriding public interest” – media

Germany’s environment ministry plans to declare important measures to protect nature like healthy soils and moorland, or climate-resilient forests as having “overriding public interest”, Tagesspiegel Background reported. 

“Federal and state authorities must take this overriding public interest into account as a particularly significant factor when balancing it against other legal interests,” said a first ministry draft of a law to strengthen natural infrastructure. The law is meant to balance the interests of nature with those of grey infrastructure like roads, railways, and electricity grids, the draft said. 

"In future, particularly important nature conservation measures that preserve and strengthen the natural infrastructure are to be given priority in the overriding public interest," said environment minister Carsten Schneider. In planning and permitting processes, valuable conservation areas should for example be given the same weight as technical infrastructure. "This would put nature conservation on an equal footing with other forms of infrastructure – energy, transport, and the economy."

In recent years, the government has introduced similar legislation for an increasing range technical energy infrastructure, for example regarding carbon capture and storage (CCS), and hydrogen production. 

Environmental NGO Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) welcomed the plans as “a much-needed and long-overdue step towards more effectively protecting the role of our landscape ecosystems as an essential foundation for life and the economy, and mitigating the negative impacts of the Future Infrastructure Act.”

The government had decided on an infrastructure law reform to speed up and facilitate planning and permitting for infrastructure projects in Germany. The act, which has yet to be approved by parliament, classifies key transport projects involving roads, railways and waterways, as well as the construction of truck parking spaces, as projects of overriding public interest and public safety. Environmental NGOs had criticised that the reform proposals would weaken environmental standards.