Abstract
Although many legal instruments have been adopted at the international and European Union levels to conserve biodiversity, continued degradation calls for reflections on their national and local implementation. The article examines biodiversity policy implementation in the outermost European region of Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago rich in biodiversity. In particular it focuses on the policy uptake of new concepts. It deals with the valuation and integration of the services provided by nature into decision-making, and the application of policy measures based on the use of the planet’s natural assets. The article also analyses the challenges encountered in such institutional change. The concepts of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions are relatively new in the scientific literature and almost absent in policy literature. This article aims to stress the relevance of these concepts for the development of more innovative policies that bring nature and its services into decision-making and policy practice.
Highlights
Human development has compromised the health of many natural habitats and their associated flora and fauna in Europe (EEA 2015) as well as in most parts of the planet (IPBES 2019)
The core of European Union (EU) environmental legislation is built on three major pillars that consist of the following directives: The Birds Directive (BD) and Habitats Directive (HB), known together as Nature Directives; the Water Framework Directive (WFD); and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) (Maes et al 2018)
Spain has clearly experienced a change in its policy design for biodiversity
Summary
Climate change Habitat destruction (degradation, fragmentation, conversion, and loss) Inappropriate fire regimes Land-use change for agriculture, fishing, demographic expansion, or deforestation Introduction by humans and spreading of invasive and exotic species into specific habitats Overexploitation and unsustainable use of natural resources (e.g. overfishing) Pollution. The core of EU environmental legislation is built on three major pillars that consist of the following directives: The Birds Directive (BD) and Habitats Directive (HB), known together as Nature Directives; the Water Framework Directive (WFD); and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) (Maes et al 2018) They constitute the “four main environmental directives” of the EU (Table 2) (Rouillard et al 2016). DFull name: Directive 2008/56/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 June 2008 establishing a framework for community action in the field of marine environmental policy It has EEA relevance (Maes et al 2018). After clarifying some concepts (Section 2) and motivating the geographical focus (Section 3), the article analyses the incorporation of the values of nature in biodiversity policy in the Canary Islands as an outermost region of Spain (Section 4) It discusses the complexity of such change and develops possible ways to overcome major obstacles.
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