 Thank you to everyone who has joined us here today. I'm thrilled to have you here for this webinar, Internet Integrating Science into the EU Nature Restoration Law. My name is Chloe Hill and I am the EU's Policy Manager and someone who has worked on the EU Nature Restoration Law a bit from the outside with a group of scientists called the EU Biodiversity Task Force who I will introduce you to during the second half of the webinar today. Firstly, I am very, very happy to introduce Damien Thompson who is a Political Advisor working inside the Parliament and he will be sharing today a bit about his work, what he does, how he uses science as a Political Advisor and giving you some insights into what life inside the Parliament is like. So we're going to start off today with a presentation from Damien. I'm excited to see what it is. I think it will be quite insightful. And then we'll jump over to the Biodiversity Task Force members, a couple of whom are here with us today. And then we'll get into a Q&A. So as you're listening to this presentation, if you have any questions at all, please feel free to write them down. And yeah, we'll get to as many of those as we can towards the end of the webinar today. The webinar will probably go for about an hour today. But if you do have any questions and you have to leave early, feel free to put them into the chat so we can still answer them. The recording for today's webinar will also be uploaded onto the EJU's YouTube channel in about a week's time. So if you want to re-watch it or share it, you can. All right, so without further ado, I'm going to pass the microphone and the computer over to Damien. Thank you, Chloe. And hello, everyone. And thanks for having me today. I'm just going to do a little stopwatch as well to try and keep track of time. But dude, let me know if I'm blabbing because I could talk about this for ages. It's been my life for the past year, basically, the EU nature restoration law. And as many of you might have seen, it was a very, very hot topic the past few months, especially before the summer with some very tense votes in the European Parliament. It's not always like this with our votes. Sometimes they go very smoothly, but this one was a very rocky road. And it still is actually. So this is what I hope to do with you today is explain to you a bit about the Parliament, how things work here a bit in terms of the legislative process. I hopefully won't bore you too much with some details and things you can already find online, but I want to give you a bit of insider information on how the process works and then explain using the nature restoration law as an example, how this worked, and also then the interaction of the science community and science-based information throughout the process or lack of as well. And hopefully I can inspire you to be advocates in the coming months as well. So who am I? I'm an advisor for the left group in the European Parliament. That means basically I help members, elected representatives do their job. I negotiate on their behalf. I help them with amendments. I do all the work of a member without being elected basically. So I'm in the background. I'm in a lot of meetings and negotiations on the very small technical details of every bit of legislation. And then we leave the big political points to the politicians. So I'm advising the members in the left group, which I'll show you in a slide in a while about the groups. And I covered this committee on the environment. So that's my specialty. So the kind of thematic topics. I'll go through a quick thing of some acronyms this place. Brussels, as you probably know, is a complete soup of acronyms, all sorts of things. And we have our own Jingo for everything. So EP, even we say for the Parliament, OLP is the Ordinary Legislative Procedure, which is basically how most legislation is made. There's a lot of procedures, a lot of complexity around EU law and EU process. But once you have this down, it's basically how you get the gist of everything. MEP is Member of European Parliament, as you probably know. And then we have these little ones about the committees, which have funny names. Some of them Envy, Reggie and Co-affects, all sorts of abbreviations. Envy is my one on environment. And then more abbreviations when we talk about the laws, because a lot of the laws have very long names. So we have NRL, the SASUR. If you don't know these, it's totally normal. NRL is the one I want to talk to you about today, nature restoration law. And then the process gets confusing with the more abbreviations for amendments, CAs for compromise amendments, RCVs, all this kind of stuff. I hope it's not too confusing to dissuade you from taking part in the EU legislative process. But as you probably know, MEPs have a mandate for five years and they're elected and represents their constituents. And they are in the European Parliament, which is one of three main institutions in the EU. This is a really simplified version to show you the ordinary legislative procedures. So you know that the commission here proposes a piece of legislation. These are the, often conceptualized as the bureaucrats or the civil service headed by, there's a political, of course, leadership. It's decided by, we have Ursula von der Leyen as the president at the moment. They propose an legislative proposal and it's amended by two houses. And that's where we are the directly elected members, 705 at the moment. And then we have, of course, the council of the EU, which represents all the member state governments. So there's two different amending processes happening at the same time. And then there's a trilog process, which is this one here. I don't know if you can see my mouse, but if you can, you can see I'm circling where the lines converge. And that's where we then have this tete tete between the council and the parliament to come up with a final text. So this is an example of the Artificial Intelligence Act. It's the same for a lot of legislation, including the nature restoration law. So where we are at the moment now is here with nature restoration law. We've been through the proposal. The parliament had its time to amend. The parliament had its big high vote in July on its mandate. The council adopted its mandate. And now we're both sitting in a room against each other, trying to find a convergent text where we can be happy and finally approve it again in both houses. And that's how we'll have a law hopefully in the end. I decided to show you that previous picture instead of this one, because this is often what it actually is like. There's a lot of moving and flowing and a lot of complications in the procedure. And it often feels this complicated. But what you saw on the previous slide is the usual root of a non-contentious piece of legislation, let's say. Here's just a quick overview of the parliament in terms of the political groupings. And why am I showing you this? Just because it's important to know in terms of the negotiations, we have one political representative from each group and we sit in a room together and that's the negotiating team. So of course some negotiators carry more weight than others. I represent this small little group here, the left. But there's of course a bigger group over here, the EPP. So we're in a room, but it's an unequal power, of course. And then there's different majorities when you add up different alliances. So often we'll have the renew, Greens, S&D and left, all defending something. And you can see how tight a majority that is compared to the other side. That's often what happens. And it's what we had with the nature restoration law, which I'll explain to you a bit more. This is a committee room. So I'm going through this a bit fast so you can just see a bit about the process. So we're all on the same page and to kind of bring you into the rooms of the parliament. I just want you to see what it looks like, what our members do. Our members of course work in committees. So there's, I think we're in 22 committees. You can see some of the abbreviations here. They're of course composed of members in a kind of proportional way to the overall representation. And this is just a screenshot here of the committee chair of the EnVy, the environment committee, the day of the nature restoration law votes in the committee. So as I'll explain later, we had months of negotiations about a text between the groups at a committee level, trying to find a text that could fly and be on work. And the final result was 44 votes in favor and 44 against, which means there wasn't a majority to adopt it. So that's why we had this crisis and quite a messy process then going into the next stage in the plenary. So that's the committee phase. Please take notes of any questions you might have because I am kind of rushing this part so that we can get into other points. But yeah, this is then the plenary. So we always go first from committee. The idea of going to committee, of course, is that we have more expertise level of members who can go through a piece of legislation and they have more experience doing previous similar pieces of legislation. And so we would hope that the members in the environment committee have an interest in the environmental policy and some sort of background, even in that. But every piece of legislation, of course, just of course needs to have the Democratic mandate from the whole parliament. So that's 705 members. You can see a lot of seats here. That means that there's a lot of individuals voting on something that they don't know a lot about. And that's a key point I want you to take going back now because coming up to a plenary, we have a plenary session, for example, next week. This is where all the members will be in Strasbourg. This is the Strasbourg plenary here, you can see. They will all be voting on legislation that they haven't looked at. So that's how the parliament works. There's so much happening here. There's a big body of work. And they're relying on a lot of influence. And that's why, of course, in Brussels, like in Washington and other places, the power of lobbies is huge and campaigns. It's really, really huge because, as I said, members are not reading the legislation. They cannot do this. It's too much detail for them, but they do know when something is contentious. They do know when something, their inbox is flooded from different constituents on a certain issue. Yeah, so that's the main thing there about that. And as I said, we vote twice in the plenary on a piece of legislation before it comes law. The first time is on the parliament's negotiating mandate. And then that's what we go into the trilogues with. And then finally, we have to vote on the outcome of the trilogues. So as I said, we're in between those two votes at the moment. So while we had a failure in committee to adopt a report in plenary, we did have a majority, a very slight majority. And it wasn't a great report. I'll tell you that will explain a bit more, but there was a lot of damage done to the nature restoration law. It isn't as good as we would hope in the left. There were some big deletions. There was some very, what we would say, just non-deliberated changes made to the mandate, which is very unfortunate because we have a mandate that isn't very consistent. It's definitely not science-based or informed enough. There's a whole deletion, for instance, on the article on agricultural ecosystems, which I'll explain. So there was a lot of damage done in the plenary vote, but the good thing was that the law wasn't stopped. We still have it and we are in the next stage of negotiations as damaged as that was. This is just so when you're looking at that room again, you can kind of see a bit what's happening. So we always have the commission in the plenary. The council has always just represented their observing, but all the members are sitting here representing their political groups in the same kind of constellation that you saw earlier of colors. Then the NRL. So I hope I haven't bored you with processes of the parliament, but to speak specifically then about this piece of legislation. It's a really, really important piece of legislation. It's really an historic piece of legislation. It's the first comprehensive nature legislation since the Habitat Structure in 1992. So there's been so little action on nature in general and comprehensively, let's say, at EU level, because it's a very difficult issue to legislate on. There's a lot of interest. There's a lot of private interest. There's a lot of big lobby groups. The farmers groups are very, very dominant also in Brussels, not always representing real farmers, but there's quite a capture there as well from the, from the agri business side. But yeah, so it's a really, really important action and it was, why do we have it? This is just a few of the points of why it actually came about. We know that biodiversity loss is really going out of control and what we're doing now isn't working. It's just really not working. We've had international goals for 2020 that haven't been met. We know that having protected areas is clearly not enough. We have protected areas in the EU, covering a certain percentage of land and sea, but it's still, even within those protected areas, around 80% of them are still in bad condition. So even the implementation is a big problem there, but we know that we can't just have parcels of land and sea that's protected and others not. Then of course, in December, I was in Canada for this biodiversity agreement. This is quite a significant agreement that was adopted, a political agreement, of course, an international agreement that we now need to implement. So we had a delegation there from the parliament to take part in those in that conference. And now it's our chance to come back to the EU and actually do something about that. So here are some of the targets that are, there's a number of targets from this agreement and we need to make it work. And then just to finish that, the parliament and council have also repeatedly called for action now in this area. So that's why we have, and it's been part of the European Green Deal, which you might have heard of. Then why restoration? So this is quite a different approach in legislation. We haven't had for, and as I said, we were, we previously had protection. We had a lot of this interest in protected areas, but now this approach of the nature restoration law is far more expansive because it's about living together with nature. So there's a different whole philosophy around it as well. And there's a huge amount of positive impacts from restoring nature. Of course, we have legal climate requirements now. We have a climate law for climate neutrality, which also has legal requirements for adaptation. We have the Paris Agreement. These are reasons why we need to actually restore our land and sea because these are huge carbon sinks and play a big role in adaptation as well. Food security is a big political issue, particularly also for the right. And they often use it to slow down progress on environmental policies, but of course, having restored and agro ecosystems and soils that are actually healthy and fertile actually increases food security. We need it for health and well-being and economic resilience. And as you can see behind this, there's a lot of science behind this. There's, of course, economics and politics as well. But if you look at what nature does, ecosystem services, climate impacts and results, and also around food security, well-being, health, these are very, need a lot of scientific information behind it. And there's a scientific imperative to act also here, as well as legal ones and moral ones. This is a bit of a wordy slide. I don't expect you to take it all in. I also just want to kind of equip you with some resources. So one thing I always say to people when I talk about the EU, and I'm sorry I'm already probably way over time, is to look up the piece of legislation. It's never done by journalists, let's say, or a huge part of society. But if you look it up, just type in the name of the piece of legislation. You'll find a link and you'll find the PDF of the document, and that's the legal document, and it'll give a nice explanatory statement, which explains the whole law in kind of layman's terms. And that's an example, this fragment here on the right, where it's saying what is in each article without the legalistic language. So I really encourage everyone to do that. So they get a really actual grounded understanding of what's in the law and what's not. But to explain the proposal briefly, there's an overarching target. Then there's also these territorial coastal freshwater and marine area targets. And then there's specific ecosystem targets also for pollinators. But agricultural ecosystems are covered and forest ecosystems are covered. And these have indicators. I'll show you some fragments later. And then member states. We always refer to member states, of course, in the EU. And so they have obligations to restore these ecosystems to different levels. And sometimes they get to determine themselves the level. Other times there's an EU target that they contribute to. And that's just a very, very quick introduction to the architecture of the nature restoration law. This is another resource I'd like you to have as well. It's called the Legislative Observatory. If you just type in anything, Artificial Intelligence Act, Legislative Observatory, whatever into Google or whatever browser, you'll be brought to this page. And it gives you all the background information on a file. So this is just the nature restoration law one. Here's all the rapporteur, the main MEP who is politically responsible for the file for drafting the parlance physician. There's the picture of them as well. So Cesar Luena, and then you have the representative from each of the political groups. And then you also see about the other committees, how they interact with it, but the lead committee, as you can see here is the environment committee. So that's always a really helpful tool just to see what's happening. So with the nature restoration law in the ordinary legislative procedure, we have a number of steps. The first is, of course, to open a deadline for amendments and then negotiations begin. So this man here, Mr. Luena is the one who's leading all the negotiations. He has all of these people in a room and all of their technical teams, including me. And we have to make political decisions with the majority to try and get the broadest majority possible around a position that will then go to the votes. And what I want to highlight with you in this slide is that none of these people are scientists or come from a very scientific grounding. I'll give him one exception. I think Jutta Paulus is a very scientific person. But yeah, they all have different backgrounds, but they lack a kind of grounding and they're reliant very much on information, external information from very important authorities as well. We have a lot of good work from the EEA to rely on, the Environmental Agency of the European Union. We have international information to rely on, but in negotiations, as you'll see as we go further, there's a lot of negotiation centered around scientific information. I just wanted to show you with this slide that we had a total of 2,345 amendments to this piece of legislation. I think it's the largest amount of amendments in history in an environmental piece of legislation and the EU. But yeah, it's a huge amount. For a piece of legislation that's not that long, it's not like the cap strategic plans or others. It's a hugely significant piece of legislation. And just to show you here, this is an example of the compromise amendments. So the compromise amendments are when this Mr. Luena, the rapporteur, is making an attempt with all these 2,000 amendments to combine the amendments in a way that would have a majority. So here's an attempt. You can see I've done a screenshot. It's under the direction of the rapporteur. We do rounds basically in a room at both technical level and political level. So technical level, I'm representing the group. And at political level, the member from my group is representing where it's more targeted issues. And we do rounds of comments. And in those rounds of comments, this is an opportunity I wanted to highlight is where we argue and negotiate. And we use argumentation of all sorts. And particularly in the environment committee, we need a lot of well-sourced and authoritative information and sources when we're trying to back up claims. And that could be about trying to increase targets. They need, for example, to increase peatland targets. We need to kind of convince the other groups about the necessity to do this. We rely on a lot of different information for this. Of course, we have other groups who want to represent other interests as well. So there's all sorts of information exchanged and attempts to convince each other in these meetings. And they last a long, long time. So that's the process of negotiations with the parliament making its reports. Then, of course, just to flag, of course, the scientific engagement, the whole process of the creation of the proposal. So just going back a bit into the commission, there's the whole impact assessment. There's a lot of information from the EEA. There's Joint Research Centre as well. There's a lot of work. And then, as I mentioned here, these last two points are more about the political negotiations about the stuff that we actually use to convince each other within the negotiations with the other groups. And also, in this case particularly, when we talk about disinformation and campaigning actually, scientific advocacy was such an important step in that part and it usually doesn't play such a role there. But this was extremely important. I don't have slides to show you some of the disinformation because you probably also, if you had any interest in this file, you probably heard a lot of it. So there was all sorts of things said about this piece of legislation, what it would do and what it wouldn't do. And one thing that was really powerful was the interaction from the scientific community with letters from very hard of places as well and just all sorts of engagement with members from scientific institutes to just clarify what is actually the scientific situation with something. So if you're looking at peatlands or forests or things, there's actually arguments being made in the public, going into the media, all sorts of accusations made that are totally have no basis in science and I'm going to touch on maybe a few of them. Peatlands, I just wanted to give you the fragment about the peatlands legislation. This is a very dear point to me as an Irish person as well, but we had a whole section on peatland restoration in the nature restoration law. We had spent a long time discussing whether these figures are sufficient, whether we need more rewetting or just restoration. Restoration could be just partial rewetting or it could be having extensive grassland. There's all sorts of totally different approaches, but some are far more effective for biodiversity, some are far more effective for carbon capture and sequestration. So there's a whole scientific wealth of knowledge needed to be able to argue with other political groups with different political priorities on these issues. And then we have, of course, whole considerations about feasibility, all sorts of different arguments here, and we have these flexibilities that were in the law. But what you need to know is that in the end of the vote in the European Parliament, the decision of the Parliament was to delete the whole section on peatlands, which is very sad. Same when we talk about forests. Forest is another very complicated area for people who do not have a scientific background in it. I don't have a scientific background in it as well, so that's another thing I want to stress to you. I have a political interest to represent a political group, but one of the key issues with the obligations on forests, as you can see here, there's a very short article 10 and it lays out some indicators. So the question is, are these indicators sufficient to represent biodiversity as a proxy? Do they need to be combined in certain ways? Do we need additional indicators? And then you have considerations, again, of feasibility, economic considerations, all sorts of arguments being made around the table for negotiations. Also about data, about the burdens of collecting this data. There's all sorts of things like this happening. And in the plenary vote, we had this happen. So as I said, there was quite a massacre happening in the big plenary vote of the 705 members voting in July. It was a rough vote where totally arbitrary things happen, let's say, because it was such a politicized vote because of such a disinformation campaign, basically. And we had deletion of deadwood. So as I said in the previous slide, you can see there's two indicators here about deadwood. And the obligation here is for member states to increase to whatever they actually determine themselves. It's up to them to have an increasing trend until there's satisfactory levels reached. So they determine the satisfactory levels, but the indicators would be in this piece of law. So we had standing deadwood and lying deadwood as indicators. And they're obviously important, as you would know, for biodiversity for different reasons. They, of course, have played a role as different habitats, both standing and lying for different habitats for different species. They also have, well, the part of the disinformation and why this happened was because of all the sorts of accusations about deadwood causing forest fires, which is a very simple argument that is very easily picked up in a very highly tense situation of Mediterranean countries suffering the consequences of forest fires and all sorts of things said there. But actually the contrary is actually true. We know that more deadwood from a scientific perspective within forests actually captures more humidity in forests. It slows down the burning actually. So it sounds counterintuitive to the public and can be very instrumentalized. But the scientific community was really key in saying, actually, hold up, this isn't really true. So we need to actually talk about that. So that's why one point I wanted to emphasize in terms of advocacy with the scientific community to hit home a point that would be really, really important, particularly when we're talking about media coverage as well. But unfortunately, this is what happened in the vote. So we have a mandate in the parliament now to try and delete these two indicators from this piece of legislation. So as you can imagine, it's quite excruciating discussions now with the council on trying to find a compromise. And the council, of course, is explaining the whole scientific background of why we need these. Also the geo cycle as well with soil and the interaction with decomposition and nutrients. We're sitting there being told very scientific information that we already knew about the importance of dead wood in forests. So just to show you here, this is what happened with the nature law vote outcome. So you can see the different political interests. It was a very small majority, 36 in favor. And this was the mandates we had. So just to point out what's next. And I'll wrap up now for questions. I'm sorry, I'm way over time. But as I said, we're in try logs. So this is the point with the council. We're going word by word through every part of our mandate. And there's a lot of our mandate that's similar, but there's a lot that's very different as I explained with the whole deletion of article nine on agricultural ecosystems. The council didn't do this. So we have to argue over on that. And then the same with dead wood and many other issues. So what's happening now is there's all sorts of draftings of proposals to try and bridge gaps between the two positions. And hopefully we'll have a final agreement by mid November, which is quite a fast process actually compared to normal way things go here. And then we have to again approve the final outcome in the environment committee where we could again have 44, 44 division. We don't know. And we still need a simple majority in the plenary of all the members. So that's what needs to happen in order to get a piece of law across the line. But what I wanted to say in terms of conclusions is that there's role for the scientific activism was so important with even just getting it across the line. Unfortunately, there were some battles lost. There was so much disinformation and really insidious campaigning to try and kill this piece of legislation using all sorts of arguments that were totally unscientific, which was very disappointing. But we of course need to try and counter that. So in terms of scientific activism, yeah, we need more and we need a lot more. And there's plenty of opportunities for engagement. There's also the need of course for science to be bipartisan. It shouldn't belong to any group. So it's not for me to say anything about claiming it, but it's about accountability throughout the whole process about ensuring that what our representatives are saying and doing is actually based on something that's scientifically robust. When it is robust, of course. Then I also wanted to convey to you about how scientific argumentation is such a key part of the deliberation process both within council and the parliament, but also the access that we as advisors and politicians have to this information is really important. So of course, as you know, a lot of scientific information is very difficult to digest very quickly with a busy timetables and often briefings or more succinct things can be super helpful for us or organizations that can help point us to things. That's really, really helpful. And then just about the whole need for trying to guarantee a scientific based approach to legislating. It's very difficult because we have it at the start of the process. We know what the whole making of the proposal. There's a very big impact assessment. There's a lot of data used. And we can say it's largely scientifically based. I wouldn't say fully, but there's definitely room for improvement. But then it goes into the Wild West here when it goes into the European Parliament and the council. And it really depends on consensus around it. And when we had this case of the nature restoration law, it was basically chucked out the window and all sorts of things were said. And there was clearly a lack of accountability about what was being said. So we need to be able to keep it a scientific process while we're in this house and come out with law that is actually scientifically based. So I think that's basically my main conclusion today. So I'll hand it back over and I'd love to take any questions. I'm sure that was confusing. So thank you. I mean, you did an amazing job for how much information you've actually managed to condense in there. It's an incredibly complicated system. And it needs to be. And so I think, you know, you could have a whole day event on this, but we just have an hour. So we do have quite a few questions coming in. Before we just throw them, I also do want to introduce a few members of the audience. I'm just going to actually promote them to the panellists because we do have the Edu Biodiversity Task Force who is sort of working on the other side of this, working externally, trying to work it out. And so we have been trying to engage in this for the last two years. It's been, I don't know why we picked the UNH Restoration Law, but I'm glad we did because it's been an incredibly interesting legislation to follow. One of the ways I actually, I first got in touch with Damien is because I was really confused by myself and I literally work on the interface of science and policy. So I think from my perspective, you know, you learn a lot by actually doing it. And although we do have this webinar today and it's really great to hear about some of these important aspects, you really only fully understand exactly how it works if you engage in it, I would say. So I think, and it's Audrey, I don't know, my panellist, if I'm out at an aggressive upgrade. Okay, so there's four people from the Task Force who are here with us today. I'll actually just start by asking them some questions before we, and we will make sure we get to as many questions as possible. There's already eight in the Q&A. But as outsiders, I'm going to let you all come in and say whatever you would like to say. But I'm going to start with this overview and I can say what surprised you about the EU Nature Restoration or about engaging with the parliament. I'm going to throw it at Bikin first. I'll do the first one on my screen. Go for it. Okay, we knew it was going to be hard that there were going to be a lot of battles that were going to be fought. But really, just as Damian also mentioned, the level of disinformation, misinformation that was out there and the nature of the fight that was being fought, it was not over science, but it was over unscientific telltales about environment, climate, biodiversity interactions, and we were appalled. Okay, politicians do not necessarily need to know about science, but we were like, okay, do they not know this? You know, I mean, they're working, they're also part of the Agriculture Commission or other commissions where science also may work and make its way into, and this is not only for the opposition, but also those that were backing the Nature Restoration Law. There were some sort of supporting arguments that were so preliminary, so primitive that we were like, okay, we really need to sort of put our hands underneath the stone and try to help these people out as much as we can update them with information. And it was really, the whole process was disappointing. But Damian, thank you so much. We followed you on Twitter and all the information that you shared was so, it was massive guidance because, okay, we know how the scientific argument can be led or should be led, but we didn't know how the things were going on within the EU itself, so it was definitely a learning curve for us. And I just kept on thinking throughout this, and I may even pose it as a question to you, is, okay, so there are the lobbies and there are the campaigners too, but I couldn't seem to find how a scientist out there who's trying to help these people or at least inform them, especially within their research area, how would they fit in? Now, that's a really sort of hard task from a scientist's perspective who's not really sort of in tune with policy. So that was what kept on going through my head. How do these people, how do the scientists can break through these circles of lobbies and campaigners and actually get to the people who are making the decision? I don't know, maybe I'll, before Damien, maybe jump into that first question. I know we will get to the rest of the ones. Thank you. And I was wondering if Adriano and Greta had anything else to add. Good afternoon and thank you, Damien, for your very interesting talk. I was surprised by the interest of biodiversity because, seeing a few years ago, this talk, this discussion about biodiversity, biodiversity would not be possible. And today there is a big focus on this. And I am part of the AGU, Task Force of Biodiversity with Chloe, Bicam and other colleagues. And I studied just a small part of this biodiversity. It's soil biodeversities, but it is 25% of global biodiversity. So it is fascinating how to, disconnections between biodiversity, scientific world and research and policy, that for me was a completely new thing. So thank you for your work and I hope to collaborate with you and your colleagues. And improving this law that is extremely important for everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for this presentation. I found it very enlightening. I still find that whole process that we've been through in the last two years, massively enriching for me as a scientist actually. And I think I became a better citizen through it as well. And I would encourage everybody to do it so that we all can become better science citizens. But what I was wanting to compliment on is, I'm a river scientist, right? Mainly. And so I was absolutely astonished by the quality of the river part within that law, right? About the free flowing river part that we looked at. And it's fantastic work I find. And I would have had hardly anything to improve in this section. Of course, from my perspective and what you also mentioned, and that's where my question also goes to, is that the peatland section was removed, which I still find absolutely mind-bobbling because this would have been one of the main things that I would think would have been the key element of this restoration law in terms of carbon capture and this very critical role that peatlands can be sourced and sink, right, depending on how we treat them. So I was wondering if you could maybe give us an insight. Why this happened, especially with regards to peatlands? Like, why peatlands, you know? Yeah. Okay. So I think there's two great questions that we're going to start the Q&A section off with those. The first one would be like, yeah, why peatlands? Why were they removed? And secondly, to Birkin's question, which is like, how can scientists who want to engage, engage in a way that's effective? Yeah. I'll pass that over to you, Damien. So how can scientists who want to engage, engage in a way that's effective? That's a really, really important question because the how is just... Of course, a lot of people are motivated, but it's just you don't know where to start, I guess. And I guess the first thing is to take an interest in what's happening and follow what's happening and the way I try to do it from before I got into politics was just keep up to speed on things, newsletters, all sorts of networks as an activist, of course, before. But yeah, this is what I was hoping to do today is kind of share a bit of procedures from the inside so you know from the outside how to interact a bit. So there's different phases. There's, of course, formal phases within the commission and the whole setting up of a proposal and there's different bodies there of consultation. But when it comes to this point and people don't know what happens with the European Parliament, the way to get involved is to contact members. So we have all sorts of amazing expertise in the scientific community that could be so powerful with advocacy. And there's also national interests there. There's all sorts of different members with different interests. They need to be contacted and told what scientists think it could be as individuals, it can be as groupings, it can be as institutes. I think it's a really good way to just contact them and let them know what you think, if it's related to something they can do. If they're a member in the committee, if they're coming up to a vote that's going to happen. Just before this vote that we had on the nature restoration law, for example, an individual as a scientist who has a background in Ireland on Peatlands, for example, if they had contacted members about this and explained the best they could in an email and phone calls and meetings, whatever, to try and convince them about the importance of having legal targets around this, that it could be influential. I don't know, it depends, but it's all about trying. So yeah, I guess what the how is just, that's why the process of what happens here is so important. The more we can share this very cryptic and difficult process here with people in their general knowledge, the easier it is for people to interact. But I guess the point there is that it depends a lot about individual and collective willingness to invest time in advocacy. It's very difficult. It's very time consuming. It takes up resources. People have other things to do. You all are very busy people as well, I'm sure. So it would also be really helpful if there was platforms we could access also as advisors or politicians when we need specific help as well. That would be really helpful. In my experience with the nature restoration law, I contacted a lot of universities in Ireland, for instance, about peatlands, because I don't have a very rich background in peatland science or just even how they work in terms of an ecosystem. So I had to learn a lot and I was really reliant on that. But that was of course me reaching out. But I think the scientific community can do a lot of reaching out as well. And as I said, I really believe it should be so bipartisan. I think it needs to be something that could be, we need to inform everyone equally about something that's not controversial. This isn't the stuff that we were dealing with in the nature restoration law, isn't controversial in the scientific community from what I understand. This is established science. So there's a lot of weight to that once you put that into advocacy, especially to counter misinformation. And it was very, very, very bad this time around. The question about why peatlands. So I'll tell you a little story, I guess. This is the first time we have legal targets for peatlands in a piece of legislation, specifically for peatlands about restoration and rewetting, which are different, let's say. And the targets proposed, you can see in the impact assessment exactly how much that would equate in terms of land per member state affected. Of course, not all member states would be affected by these targets, but some would be very affected and others less Ireland, I think was one of the most affected. And then we have Germany and Sweden, Finland, Netherlands. But they're all affected very differently. So some of them had large farming communities, which have drained peatlands, others have large forestry sectors or more using drained peatlands. And for some it was a bigger problem to have these targets than others. In the case of Ireland, it became a problem to have ambitious targets because it would mean acting in the farming sector, an agricultural area. And that means really incentivizing a change in land use. And we're talking about private land. And especially when you've geared up an agricultural system so based on production and export of two products, dairy and beef. And you've driven down this road. It's very hard to reverse that politically in that context and say, actually, you need to rewet your land. So they don't want to do this to a large extent. And the background story I want to give you is that the two flexibilities, I didn't go into detail on them, but the two flexibilities that were in the article nine were to allow countries like Ireland to get around this problem. So they could actually rely on rewetting a peatland for extraction. So the extraction sites and also for forestry. So that's why when I was saying about the scientific information informing of the proposal, there's still political interference, of course, in the proposal. It's a political proposal. But that's what happened there. In terms of the deletion, it became such a toxic debate on many fronts. And agriculture was the main driving force for rejection of the proposal. So I'm not talking about a constructive approach to try and work with genuine concerns. There were genuine concerns. I'm sure there's plenty of things to be actually have a conversation about in terms of these targets. But then there was just a whole front of just no more regulation and anything to do with nature is bad for agriculture. That was the narrative. And we do have to point the finger like this is Copa Kojeka. This is the Agri business mobilization in the European Union. And they wanted a full rejection of the proposal. They mobilized very, very strongly and they have a lot of networks, national networks that were able to repeat the same stuff, unscientific stuff and completely nonsense. Things that are false about the proposal that you could just read in the proposal and see they weren't true, for example, and things, of course, that were scientifically not true from both of those perspectives. So they had this network that became a disinformation network, which is very unfortunate. And then this was captured politically. And the idea was that if you look at anything said from the right wing in terms of the whole debate around the nature restoration law, it was that it would endanger our food security, which as I explained is the opposite is true. And that it would mean giving up land for farm farming. So that, yeah, that's why so they think rewetting means no production. In certain cases it does, let's be honest, but it doesn't have to mean that. And actually, the same was said about about high diversity landscape features. So about trees, ponds and hedges and all sorts of biodiversity features within agricultural ecosystems. But we know that again, the opposite is true. It's not about giving up land and reducing production. So it just became toxic. That's the answer. I guess it became very toxic and it was politically convenient to delete it for the majority in the parliament in a vote that was not a roll call vote. So it wasn't a public vote. We can't see the names of that, but it's very unfortunate. And we'll see what will happen now with the outcome. It's unlikely that there will be a full deletion, but yeah. So this is another area. I'm just going to jump in here to use my role as moderator. In terms of I'm going to go back to the first question actually because I have a couple of things to add in terms of how scientists can contribute. And I'm saying this as someone who actually shares the biodiversity task force because that's a fantastic way for scientists to be able to contribute through one of these working groups through a task force. There are now more and more scientific organizations and research institutions who are doing this on an organizational level so that you as an individual scientist don't have to provide information all on your own. And actually from my perspective, that's almost not possible just because especially for really complex topics like this, you need a diversity of expertise in there. And you also need to understand the political landscape. I mean, we've heard a bit about it today how complicated it is. And to be able to follow that and follow all the things that are happening. It's my full time job. I really struggled with it with the nature restoration law. It was really complicated. It's not something I could have done alone either. So if you are interested, I can tell from the Q&A we have 12 questions lined up so I can tell from the Q&A people are really interested. I would say try and use your networks, try and find out who else you know in the research community who is engaged in these issues or engage in other relevant policy issues and find ways of contributing to that. And just one more example from the biodiversity task force. I have linked our thing down below. We did a little document of Peatlands too because we did want MEPs to consider and we sent it to all the relevant MEPs, which again is a headache to do, but get it anyway. Also very time consuming. You need a full time job to do that too. But we're also at the moment working on a document that focuses on the restoration of forests, basically. I don't know Damian, maybe we're too late with this for the trial process. I don't actually know where we're at right now. We're trying hard. But we are actually asking, we're a group of eight scientists and we do have our own area of expertise, but we're also asking for external input on this document too. So from other experts who are specifically focusing on forestry issues because we need that network. So there are opportunities to engage quite often the only way you find out about Mo is through informal networking, which again full time job. So some options there, see how many you can do. But now I'm going to turn to the Q&A and try and get through as many as we can in the next set of 15 minutes. The first one is from Marie, and she actually has quite a straightforward question, I think. So she's actually going back into your presentations from where she actually asked the question as regarding the committee vote. So her question is, I didn't quite follow who was sent for the committee vote before the plenary. Is it one person from a political party? How is that person chosen? Maybe you just want to outline sort of the role of the committees again and how that works. Exactly. So the committees are smaller representations of the political composition of the parliament. So as I said in the environment one, it's 88 members. So there's 705 in total in the parliament, but just a little fraction of them then in the environment committee. And they're chosen whoever's on the committee, it's chosen by internal discussions at the start of the mandate on within the political group itself. So for the example, the left has six full seats, 12 and counting substitutes so we can have substitute members. And they're the ones following all the work of that committee. So and then we have one person per file. So there's a legislative proposal. It's only one person in that committee per group following the negotiations around that. Thank you. I think then we've already sort of gone over yours a little bit already everything has to leave. So Loic is actually asking also quite interesting question here. He said there seems to be like there was more backlash to nature restoration law compared with other laws such as 555. Is this correct or does it only seem so? And if it is correct, why? It's definitely correct. And it's because of politics. So the big hallmark of this commission. So the last four years and the last next year to come is the European Green Deal. There's all this talk the political priorities that say of this commission are the twin transition they call of digitalization and the European Green Deal. So the key from the European Green Deal was of course the climate law, which was set the 2050 climate targets. But the other pillar of it, and there was actually plenty of other pillars is also about chemicals about food systems about everything. A lot of stuff really in the in a very comprehensive communication around a lot of policy changes, which a lot were affected. A lot of new things in the climate sides and new proposals. We talked about the carbon border adjustment mechanism, revision of the emissions trading those big, big changes. But the pillar that was kind of left to last was on nature. And this was the first legislative proposal on nature as I said in decades. And why was it treated differently? I think politics change. So as Chloe also mentioned, I think it's a really important point is that scientists probably don't have a broader grasp around the political dynamics and how they're changing and moving. So at the very start of this Monday, when you all voted in the last elections in the European elections, there was what we call the often call here the green wave. There was a big surge in climate mobilizations before the elections. We were all in the streets. There was 70,000 people in Brussels every month protesting and it was a high thing on the agenda, the environmental agenda. It kind of waned, let's say with COVID. There wasn't people on the streets and as much then we had of course inflation, war in Ukraine, all sorts of different priorities coming. And there was a difference also in terms of living standards and a lot of a big trend across Europe. So we of course as a political group follow a lot what's happening in each of the member states. There was quite a swing to the right in a lot of countries if you look at what happened in the Netherlands and their local region elections. There was a very big swing into a reactionary agenda to that green agenda. There was a big, big bounce also if you look at what happened in Sweden in Finland in many places, even in Spain. There's growth on the reactionary agenda if you look at Italy, we have a big member state that has a huge support that has a very reactionary agenda. So I think there's a lot of thought about the next elections. As I said this proposal came a lot later compared to the 555 legislative proposals which were earlier in the mandate. Now there's a bit of fatigue within the right wing and there's a bit of a drift from the centre right to further right to try and sweep up these votes. So there's definitely political movement there. We still don't know what's going to happen the next year and before the next elections are in June. But that's what's been happening the past few months definitely. We don't know what could happen until then. But it's definitely true to say that this is treated differently and the other point to make around why this was treated differently to climate is that the climate legislation we dealt with is more broader let's say in terms of what it does with targets and it's less about private land use. So every time we go into private land use you have very strong reactions. We currently have also a new law about soil which was supposed to be a soil health law and unlike air, unlike water, soil has a very direct connection with private land use as well and that makes things very complicated. You have different actors, landowners, farmers, people who get very agitated once we talk about different obligations within this. So NRL, although it wasn't of course about private land use, there was a private land use element to some of the obligations which didn't necessarily mean actors were obliged to do things but it was the part of the narrative at least. So it helped build that wave of reactionary action. Very interesting. So the next one is also maybe a bit more of a straightforward answer. What happens if the European Parliament and the council don't find an agreement on the common text? This is an excellent question because there are a lot of scenarios in the Parliament that even me, as I've been here for seven years, they're still not clear because they don't happen, we're just so used to things working smoothly. So to be honest, there's always an agreement possible between even very diverging positions. And we often say in the Parliament that the council has a bit of an upper hand because they have 27 member states to go back to and please and it's very difficult. They often have more expertise in a different, they kind of have this hands tied approach, which is a bit difficult for us in the Parliament to negotiate against. But there's always compromise and a landing zone eventually happening. It does happen. There's always, if there's a willingness to happen. If it doesn't, then we have a freezer basically something's put into the freezer. And of course, something has to be a political priority for it to actually conclude. So we have rotating presidencies in the council and they every six months change and they present their priorities and if it's not a priority, there's not going to be much movement because there's limited resources. This is a high priority for the Spanish presidency, luckily, so that's why we're moving quite well here. But there's a whole other branch of scenarios. What happens if the Parliament doesn't approve the text, for example, that's another thing. Do we renegotiate or do we have another chat? There's all sorts of things that are still not super clear and ways of getting around them. But what usually happens is we have an agreement and we have an adoption in each side and if not, then they have to renegotiate or try to. Very exciting. So this time I might be more of a question for the EU by diversity task force. The EU is quite active in providing science advice to the EU Parliament. What about the council? Is that somewhere where we can have some level of scientific influence? Maybe I'll go first. I don't know if anyone else from the by diversity task force wants to jump in after me. I would say we don't engage with the council because they're not as transparent as the Parliament. But understanding who you can contact in the Parliament will much more open, willing to come on a webinar, for example, willing to actually sit down and have a coffee or whatever. So there's a lot more exchange, I think, and I have looked into contacting the council and I don't even know where to start. I don't know if anyone from the by diversity task force has had a go at that before or thought about it. I'll jump in if I can to also say that even for me in the other institution, it's very hard to know what happens in the council. It's often a black box and it's very secretive what happens. It's not as public the voting. Well, there's a lot of things that happen that aren't in the public eye, let's say, and not to say that this place of the Parliament is a good representation of transparency and politics, but it is different. And then, as I said, you have 27 member states to lobby. It's different to one representative per political group, which will be six or seven. So that's a lot more work. And then you have a lot of the capitals doing a lot of the work. So you really it's not even all in Brussels. Brussels has, of course, permanent representations of each member state, but then you have the positions also being taken in Madrid Berlin Helsinki, etc. So it's very difficult, I will say, but it's definitely worthwhile. And even if it means, as you say, Chloe, with sending briefings to the parliamentarians here, if just sending it to the capitals, if you can get the contacts or the permanent representations, that's definitely good. Yeah, yeah, that's actually a really good point. I mean, it's not something I've tried to do before, but if you happen to have a next to a friend who works in that area, make better friends with them, I guess. Get a foot in the door. I'll go for one last question. We're not going to get all through all of them today. Sorry, everyone, but we're already sort of at the time limit. The final question I'll ask is from Astrid, which is, are there also science advisors not affiliated to a faction within the parliament? Or is that inefficient in the policymaking process? So I was going to try and answer some questions as well. But yeah, no, it's better to do it here. No, because the parliament is a politically constituted place. So we have the reason we have political groupings is to have a group that can employ advisors and help their members. We do have a section of members who can't find a group. They're the ones without a home. That's called the non attached and there's actually quite a few of them still around 40 or something. And they have some advisors who would be kind of, I don't know if you could say non political or whatever, but they're not. They don't have a political family, let's say they're just there to try and follow things and help the member make a decision and what they make sure that the information is clear. But the advice that we have is all political, because we do represent a political mandate. So my mandate is very clear from my members what I have to represent when I go into negotiations. The mandate from the SD one is the same and the greens and yeah, we have to advise based on what we know about the values about the previous decisions and previous positions. And yeah, and knowledge of the parties that constitute the groups. Okay, so we will end it there because we are sort of at an hour an hour over an hour. But I would like to thank you very, very much for coming along and explaining all of this to us. One final question. Is it okay if I share your PowerPoint presentation with people who are here today. You may it's just lots of pictures but not much content. That's that's fantastic. I think I'll also share a couple of links of the things you mentioned so you can find it. So everyone you'll get an automated email, I'll probably wait until next week once this webinar is online for coming to the webinar as well and you can either rewatch it or share it with someone you think might be interested. But you'll get an email with those details. So if you do have any additional follow up questions you can email me my email be attached to that email. And then maybe at some point we can write some sort of geo policy blog post to answer all the ones we didn't get to today. Let's see, I will also say if you want to come and hear Damian speak again, he will be participating in a secondary event on the 19th and 20th of October, 20th of October, I think that session is. I'll also include those details in the follow up email as well. Any final comments from biodiversity task force thing is I have you up here as well. Any thoughts. Okay, we'll do the regular rounds. Thank you so much for joining us and this has been really valuable. Because, you know, we do the science but we cannot not necessarily engage with policymakers and it's really enlightening. Yes, I think Chloe can save the questions just as I work on the forest and and so article 10 was really down to my heart and and the compromise amendments were actually extremely well penned. I agree with and agree that they were really well thought out and the details are extremely valuable. And when they all got wiped out during the voting it was a major disappointment so now we are as biodiversity task force painting the first piece but we but on our side, because you know policy is a little bit more. Well, you, you, it's legal, it's legal language so. But in science science is a little bit more fluid because you can have a new discovery that can just wipe out a lot of the old ones so things change and shift all the time. And so when these, when these legislations are being penned. As scientists we feel a little bit, just as an agreed said before about the free flowing rivers and and all this language that kind of gets worked in that we get a little bit off but now thank you so much with all these clarifications. It seems like as a task force we are on the right track and we will just continue doing what we do just one final very final. Last comment in the audio science. You actually have scientific documentation, which is very helpful. I'm sure to the politicians. And there was actually a piece there specifically on that would that I found when I was researching to see what politicians had available to them with a through the. Through your hub, not necessarily from, you know, outside or science scientists as us, but you explain also the whole process of the agro groups and private land ownership, etc. But what happens to all this material that's that's already been researched written reported in PDF format that's that's in the EU science app, which is available to politicians. I mean, is it not even considered. That's my final sort of question that was not the comment. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, like the thing is that science can be used. Well it doesn't have to be used in negotiations and there's all sorts of wild counter arguments happening in negotiations and as I explained earlier that there's also political imbalance in our representation in negotiations as well so if the pp is speaking or the S&D is speaking they have a lot more weight to what they're saying so it depends on what they're convinced about. And I'm not sure if there's enough knowledge about the scientific wealth of things that we actually collect and distribute here internally as well. Because there's a there's a lot of reading involved a lot of things to do, but there's a very, very packed agenda and I don't think there's enough awareness probably for members as well to know about how to access the scientific like the authoritative stuff around it. There's a lot of lobby contact as I explained and they often take that as the authority to follow. So that's obviously complicated. And one thing I didn't get to mention is that when we do trilogues, we have a legal team. So we have a legal team with us in the European Parliament and they have a legal team in the council. And there's often legal argumentation made between them. So this is we shouldn't include this because legally it's very difficult with the treaties blah blah blah. All this kind of stuff said but we don't have the same kind of thing in terms of scientific integrity or any kind of scientific check within the trilogues we don't really have this the best we have is the commission. The commission can stand by something and say we do this because of the impact assessment and said this and our findings of this. So the scientific influences through that or through our argumentation. So right now we're sitting down in negotiations, and we're spending hours with the council explaining the geocycle of how that would decomposes and all its different sources from the PRC and international sources about how it's so important for the nutrient cycle. They're explaining this in detail to us as political argumentation to why we should reinstate these indicators for example. So yeah. We'll have a document to add to that by the end of next week maybe. No, thank you. Okay, so I think we'll end it there officially. And yeah, thank you to everyone who came to participate in this webinar. And again, thank you to Danian, thank you to the Biodiversity Task Force. You will get an email from me next week. And yeah, have a great evening everyone.