L 114/26
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
12.4.2022
(22)
To meet the needs of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, including investment priorities for Natura 2000 and green infrastructure, the Commission has assessed that at least EUR 20 000 000 000 a year should be unlocked for spending on nature.
This will require mobilising private and public funding at national and Union level, including through a range of different programmes.
(23)
In line with the Commission communication of 14 October 2020 entitled ‘Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability Towards a Toxic-Free Environment’, the 8th EAP should support the Union’s efforts to promote the sound management of chemicals through international cooperation and partnerships, in bilateral, regional and multilateral fora as well as in cooperation with third countries.
The Union will, in line with international commitments, ensure that hazardous chemicals banned in the Union are not produced for export, including by amending relevant legislation if and as needed.
(24)
Both in the Union and globally, land and soil continue to be degraded by a wide range of human activities, such as poor land management, land-use change, unsustainable agricultural practices, land abandonment, pollution, unsustainable forestry practices and soil sealing, and due to biodiversity loss and climate change, often combined with other factors, thus reducing the capacity of land and soil to provide ecosystem services and functions.
(25)
The global food system, including agriculture, fisheries and aquaculture, remains one of the key drivers of climate change and environmental degradation, including global deforestation.
In the Union, the transformation of the Union food system is needed in order to ensure the attainment of the priority objectives of the 8th EAP.
(26)
According to the Workshop report on Biodiversity and Pandemics of 29 October 2020 issued by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the underlying causes of pandemics are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change, including land-use change, agricultural expansion and intensification, and wildlife trade and consumption, and other drivers.
Climate change has been implicated in disease emergence and will likely cause substantial future pandemic risk, whilst biodiversity loss is also associated with the transformation of landscapes and can lead to increased emerging disease risk in some cases.
According to the report, the cost of inaction vastly outweighs the cost of implementing global strategies to prevent pandemics based on reducing wildlife trade and land-use change and on increasing One Health surveillance.
(27)
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an unprecedented global health and economic crisis, has demonstrated again the importance of applying the multi-sectoral One Health approach in policy-making, which recognises that human health depends on the state of the environment and is connected to its components and factors, including animal health, and that actions to tackle threats to health have to take into account a complexity of health and environmental interrelations.
The 8th EAP should contribute to the full integration of the One Health approach across all levels of policy-making.
(28)
Progressing towards the recognition of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as laid out in Resolution 48/13 of the United Nations Human Rights Council, is an enabling condition for attaining the priority objectives of the 8th EAP.
(29)
The term ‘ecosystem approach’, which has been established under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way in order to help reach a balance between the three objectives of that Convention, namely, conservation, sustainable use and benefit sharing of biological diversity.
(30)
According to the EEA report ‘Nature-based solutions in Europe: Policy, knowledge and practice for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction’, nature-based solutions (NBS) for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction are actions which work with and enhance nature to restore and protect ecosystems and to help society to adapt to the impacts of climate change and slow further warming, while providing multiple additional benefits.
The implementation of NBS should be coherent with the 8th EAP’s priority objectives.