Environmental fallout is becoming a tangible reality for a growing number of Europeans amidst unabated climate change. While much of this harm is hard to attribute to a single cause or set of policies, there are cases where a few actors bear clear responsibility for the damage. This dynamic is visible in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, where voters have expressed their frustration through the ballot box.

The ground in the Dutch province of Groningen shakes more often than one might expect. More than 1,600 kilometres from the nearest active volcano, and far from any major natural fault lines, the earthquakes that trouble this region are entirely man-made.

For decades, the Netherlands extracted vast quantities of natural gas from beneath Groningen’s soil, powering homes, fuelling industry, and filling state coffers, all while quietly destabilising the earth below. What began as an economic triumph has since left a complicated legacy: thousands of small earthquakes have damaged homes, unsettled communities, and eroded public trust. Today, residents live not only with cracks in their walls, but with fractures in their confidence in the institutions that once championed the project. From compensation claims and legal battles to the ballot box, this distrust is increasingly visible today.

Gas in Groningen

Up until 1959, the North Sea area was assumed to be mostly devoid of oil and natural gas. This changed when exploratory drilling by the Dutch Petroleum Company (NAM), jointly owned by Shell and Esso, discovered a gas field in the municipality of Slochteren, in the province of Groningen. While little was known about its size at first, further drilling revealed a site large enough to be of commercial interest. After the Dutch government granted a concession in 1963, extraction began under a consortium of the state-owned mining company, NAM, Esso, and Shell.

The ensuing gas rush was further amplified by expectations that gas would lose its relevance over the following decades with the anticipated rise of nuclear energy. Consequently, there was a strong push to scale up production and sell Groningen’s gas quickly, and early concerns – particularly about possible ground subsidence – were brushed aside. Extraction ultimately peaked in 1976, at 88 billion cubic metres, roughly equivalent to Germany’s entire current annual gas consumption. Only after the oil crisis of the 1970s and growing social resistance to nuclear energy had shown that gas was here to stay did the government begin treating the Groningen field as more of a long-term reserve, slightly reducing extraction and diversifying towards smaller fields, particularly in the North Sea.

A Turning point

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the Groningen field seemed nothing short of a miracle. Gas profits flowed generously into shareholders’ pockets as well as into the treasury. The Dutch government received up to 85 per cent of gas revenues, which at times accounted for as much as a fifth of total government spending. For a small country still rebuilding after World War II, this was transformative. Roads, schools, hospitals, and social programmes were funded in no small part by the resource extracted from beneath Groningen.

Yet the benefits to the province itself proved limited. The gas sector created around 9,200 jobs – meaningful but modest for a region with a labour force of approximately 286,000. As a Dutch parliamentary inquiry concluded in 2023, only about 1 per cent of the total revenues from the gas field flowed back to Groningen. Most of the economic value flowed upwards to The Hague, to be redistributed at the national level, far from the villages that hosted the extraction sites.

National policy choices only deepened this imbalance. Unlike Norway, which established a sovereign wealth fund on its oil revenues, the Netherlands folded gas income directly into the state budget. This allowed for the rapid expansion of the Dutch welfare state, but at the cost of longer-term planning. The gas windfall also brought what The Economist would coin the “Dutch Disease” in 1977: as revenues strengthened the guilder, Dutch manufacturing lost its international competitiveness, and unemployment more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1977, rising from 1.1 to 5.1 per cent. In short, the gas boom filled the treasury while hollowing out industry.

Things get shaky

For the first two decades of gas extraction, the ground beneath Groningen remained deceptively calm. Despite early concerns about subsidence, no seismic activity was officially recorded, reinforcing the belief that the risks were manageable. This confidence began to erode on Christmas Day in 1986, when a magnitude-2.8 earthquake struck near Assen. In 1991, the Dutch meteorological institute recorded the first officially recognised induced earthquake directly linked to the Groningen field, with a magnitude of 2.4. From there, seismic activity accelerated: four earthquakes in 1991, six in 1992, and 16 in 1993.

Induced earthquakes occur when human activity, most commonly hydrocarbon extraction, alters pressure levels in underground rock formations. As gas is removed, pressure drops, the surrounding rock compacts, and stress builds along geological faults until it finds sudden release. In Groningen, this process unfolded gradually but relentlessly.

By the early 2010s, the situation had escalated sharply. In 2013 alone, 133 earthquakes were confirmed across the Netherlands, 121 of them in Groningen, averaging roughly one every three days. The turning point came on 16 August 2012, with the Huizinge earthquake, measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale, the strongest ever recorded above the Groningen field.

Though most of these tremors were classified as light by seismological standards, their impact on buildings and residents was anything but negligible. Homes cracked, foundations shifted, and entire neighbourhoods began to deteriorate.

Still, the political response lagged despite the mounting evidence. In January 2013, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Henk Kamp, decided against an immediate reduction in gas extraction, against the urgent recommendation by the State Supervision of Mines, instead commissioning 14 separate investigations into the maximum credible earthquake magnitude, seismic hazard, effects on housing and infrastructure, security of supply, and the fiscal cost of a production cut. This decision came at a time when the Netherlands was in a period of fiscal austerity, and gas revenues were not easy to forgo.

The prevailing assumption was that the risks could be managed financially. A compensation scheme for earthquake damage was expanded, based on the belief that revenues could offset material losses and political fallout. Extraction would continue; damages would be paid.

It was not until 2014 that production was capped – at 42.5 billion cubic metres – for the first time explicitly due to the earthquakes. Further reductions followed, though always cautiously. Plans to phase out extraction entirely were announced, revised, and at one point delayed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which briefly revived Groningen’s strategic importance. Gas extraction from the field ultimately ceased in October 2023. By then, roughly 2.3 trillion cubic metres of gas had been extracted from one of the largest gas fields ever exploited.

But even with extraction halted, the harm persists. Over 3,300 buildings were demolished in Groningen due to earthquake damage between 2012 and 2023. Furthermore, following the Huizinge quake, hundreds of thousands of damage reports have been filed. The Dutch state has paid over 1.2 billion euros in compensation, yet many residents describe the process as slow, opaque, and adversarial. Studies by researchers at the University of Groningen also link sustained exposure to the risk of earthquakes to deteriorating mental and physical health outcomes, and even to increased mortality. Entire communities lived for years in a state of permanent vigilance, unsure whether their homes were safe or whether promised repairs would ever materialise.

Shaking up the vote

What makes Groningen particularly distinctive is not just the scale of the damage, but its origin. The harm that people there have faced for decades is immediate, local, and unmistakably man-made. And that has had significant political consequences.

Jordan McAllister and Afiq bin Oslan tackle this topic in a recent paper titled “Shaking up the Vote: The Electoral Impact of Induced Earthquakes”. Placing the Groningen earthquakes at the centre of a broader inquiry, the authors examine how first-hand experience of the direct consequences of environmental harm has translated into changed voting behaviour.

Groningen is an unusually well-suited setting for this kind of study. Unlike pollution or an oil spill, where the distribution of harm is ultimately shaped by human decisions, induced earthquakes strike in nearby areas depending on geological factors that no one controls. They are caused by human activity (unambiguously so in Groningen, where earthquakes were virtually non-existent before drilling began), but where exactly they strike is essentially random. As a result, the researchers can reasonably associate differences in voting behaviour across polling stations with earthquake exposure rather than some pre-existing political difference between areas.

Using data on 891 earthquakes linked to the Groningen field alongside highly granular polling-station-level data across Groningen and its two neighbouring provinces, Friesland and Drenthe, McAllister and bin Oslan ask whether voter exposure to induced earthquakes increases electoral support for GroenLinks, the Dutch Green party. The answer, in short, is yes. Across three elections and multiple model specifications, areas with greater earthquake exposure consistently show higher GroenLinks vote shares in subsequent elections.

Environmental shocks then do not automatically and uniformly push electorates in a greener direction. How exposed they are, and what else that exposure demands of them, matter as well.

The paper also finds that earthquakes are associated with a significant fall in support for the PvdA, the Dutch Labour party, consistent with the idea that earthquake exposure is prompting vote-switching towards the Greens from other parties on the left, rather than simply raising overall turnout.

Crucially, the relationship between earthquake exposure and green voting is not linear. It peaks at moderate levels of exposure and weakens at the very highest levels of impact. The authors suggest that those most severely affected may come to prioritise immediate material concerns such as compensation, repairs, and economic security over electoral environmental preferences. At the same time, those experiencing meaningful but less overwhelming exposure are most likely to translate that experience into a green vote. Environmental shocks then do not automatically and uniformly push electorates in a greener direction. How exposed they are, and what else that exposure demands of them, matter as well.

Beyond Groningen

The Groningen case is, in several respects, unusual. Induced seismicity directly linked to gas extraction in a densely populated region, with clear institutional responsibility and a single identifiable operator, is not a combination that recurs frequently elsewhere. But the broader mechanism it illustrates – locally experienced and clearly attributable environmental harm feeding back into political behaviour – is hardly confined to the Netherlands.

In the Val d’Agri valley in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, the energy giant ENI’s oil extraction operations present a comparable picture. The region hosts the largest onshore oil field in Western Europe, yet its population has seen negligible economic benefit from decades of extraction while bearing environmental costs, including contaminated water sources and elevated rates of cancer and respiratory illness.

The political response has been real: ENI executives have faced joint legal action from the regional government, municipalities, and environmental agencies. Moreover, grassroots organisations such as COVA Contro have built sustained platforms for accountability. Anti-extraction sentiment has surfaced electorally too: in the 2019 regional election, a left-wing candidate running explicitly on an anti-oil platform received 4.3 per cent of the vote, though this has remained a niche position rather than a decisive force.

Two factors may help explain the gap between Italy and the Netherlands. Firstly, economic anxiety in the Val d’Agri valley, one of Italy’s poorest regions, tends to compete with environmental grievance as a political driver. Secondly, unlike the Netherlands, Italy has no well-established Green party capable of channelling anti-extraction sentiment into parliamentary weight. While the Groningen parallel seems to hold in terms of the underlying injury and political mobilisation, the similarities are less clear when it comes to votes.

The harm is real enough, but the causal pathway remains tangled, and the harm harder to isolate.

The German lignite regions offer another striking parallel. In the Rhineland and Lausitz, local communities have borne the costs of extraction in ways that are, if anything, more visible than in Groningen: more than 50 villages or parts of villages have been demolished in North Rhine-Westphalia alone to make way for expanding open-cast mines, with entire communities uprooted and resettled. The public has opposed these projects fiercely: the planned demolition of the village of Lützerath to expand RWE’s Garzweiler II mine drew thousands of protesters over years of sustained resistance; in 2023 the eventual five-day police clearance of an activist occupation of the village became a national flashpoint. But was there also a wider political response?

The vote share data from North Rhine-Westphalia is at least suggestive: the Greens rose from 6.4 per cent to 18.2 per cent in state elections between 2017 and 2022, in contrast to their more modest gains at the federal level, from 8.9 per cent in 2017 to 14.8 per cent in the 2021 Bundestag election. That rise, though, predates the party’s own turn: In October 2022, when they were in government federally and in the state, the Greens agreed to the deal with RWE that cleared Lützerath for demolition. This turn was viewed by many as a change in sides. Whether this will cost them electorally is difficult to determine.

The confounders here are too numerous to read much into either shift directly, but the broader point stands: these cases offer at least plausible instances of locally experienced environmental harm feeding back into political behaviour, in different institutional and partisan contexts. What they also reveal, by contrast, is why Groningen is such a rare analytical opportunity. Elsewhere, the harm is real enough, but the causal pathway remains tangled, and the harm harder to isolate.

The limits of attribution

The cases considered so far share a key feature: the source of harm is local, visible, and traceable to a specific operator or set of decisions. Where the previous section showed variation – Groningen producing a measurable electoral response, Basilicata and the lignite regions less so – the explanation lay not in attribution, but in what came after it: whether a credible electoral channel existed to convert grievance into votes. The mobilisation, in all three cases, seems real enough. But not all environmental harms afford even that starting point.

When flooding devastates a region or drought destroys harvests, the causal chain is longer and more contested. Climate change may have made the event more severe, but the link between many natural disasters and specific policy choices is harder to draw, and therefore harder to convert into electoral accountability. The devastating floods that struck Valencia in October 2024, killing over 230 people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Spain’s recent history, illustrate this well. Scientists broadly agreed that climate change had intensified the rainfall, but the political response was far from unified. Multiple levels of government faced – and traded – blame simultaneously: regional president Carlos Mazón faced mass protests over the dismantling of an emergency unit his administration had shut down just the year before, while the national government faced accusations of insufficient coordination. Rather than producing more support for environmental protection, the debate became highly polarised, with disinformation campaigns seeking to redirect blame onto environmentalists themselves for having allegedly restricted flood-control infrastructure.

Groningen and the cases it can usefully be set alongside illustrate that the political salience of environmental harm is shaped not only by its severity, but by its legibility, by how clearly it can be traced to identifiable decisions, and how directly it is felt. As the consequences of both energy policy and climate change continue to accumulate across Europe, that kind of clarity is likely to become rarer.

Bucharest is home to one of the largest protected urban natural areas in Europe: Văcăresti Natural Park, spanning more than 186 hectares. Interestingly, the wetland, hosting hundreds of unique species of flora and fauna, is more the result of accident rather than design. Romanian civil society has played a crucial role in preserving Văcăresti, and efforts are now underway to develop a network of rewilded urban green spaces in and around Bucharest.  

Romania’s capital offers its inhabitants a dire lack of green space – less than 10 square metres per capita, far below the 26 square metres required by the EU or the 50 recommended by the WHO. By comparison, Ljubljana, often cited as Europe’s greenest capital, provides over 540 square metres of green space per inhabitant.  

Yet Bucharest is home to one of the most remarkable urban natural ecosystems in Europe. The Văcăresti delta started out as a half-built, man-made reservoir during Romania’s communist era, but it was abandoned after the change of regime in 1989 and left in prolonged administrative limbo. Over the next few decades, wildlife reconquered the park without human intervention.  

The feral, accidental type of nature that thrived on the site is deeply tied to how Bucharest evolved as a city: Like many post-communist capitals, it has seen three and a half decades of rapid and chaotic land development. The transition to market-based land ownership outpaced coherent urban planning, leading to profit-driven growth in which land was treated primarily as a commodity. While this scenario is not unique to Bucharest, its effects here are particularly acute, resulting both in severe ecological deficits and unexpected potential.  

A success story 

Romanian authorities delayed completing or repurposing the Văcăresti reservoir for more than two decades, which allowed the ecosystem to develop spontaneously. When biologists began documenting the area’s flora and fauna in 2011, the park had earned a bad reputation shaped by years of neglect, frequent garbage dumping, and rumours about its supposed danger.  

Paulina Anastasiu, director of the Botanical Gardens of Bucharest, recalls that even researchers were initially hesitant to enter the area: “I didn’t even dare to visit the place because there were urban legends saying that the place is full of feral dog packs, that a military unit from the area was using the ground for exercises. With my team made up entirely of women, we didn’t dare go there. But one day we decided to go, and, to my surprise, we didn’t encounter any danger, so we started returning regularly to study the flora.” What Anastasiu’s team found was a highly biodiverse ecosystem, including two plant species listed as endangered in Romania.  

With more than 330 plant and 94 bird species initially identified in the area, Văcăresti became an active battleground between economic and environmental interests. “We worked to convince the authorities that it’s important to have a place like this in a big city,” recalls Cristian Neagoe, communications and community manager at Bucharest Natural Park, an NGO focused on rewilding the metropolitan area. “They kept saying that development is the number one priority in Bucharest. There were, of course, various real estate projects targeting that area.” 

For the NGO, a major priority was reconnecting people living in the vicinity with the place itself, remedying decades of disconnect following the demolition of the neighbourhood located in the Văcăresti area during the communist era to make space for the reservoir. Academics and civil society groups worked together for several years to document species, conduct an environmental assessment, lead volunteer garbage clean-up campaigns, create visitor infrastructure, and advocate for protection. Their efforts proved successful in both directions: the communities near the delta reclaimed it as part of their neighbourhood, the authorities recognised the value the area was bringing to the city, and, in 2016, Văcărești officially became an urban natural park. The site’s ecological value has continued to unfold over time, with ongoing monitoring documenting 180 bird species – more than a third of Romania’s total. Over time, Văcărești has become a leisure, research, and environmental education hotspot.  

“Annually, between 50,000 and 75,000 children visit the park,” said Mircea Calnegru, director of the park’s administration, at a recent event that celebrated a decade of protection for Văcărești. At the same time, he called for further development of the park’s infrastructure to enhance climate resilience and meet educational and research needs around its ecosystems.  

In Bucharest, places like Văcărești are increasingly understood through the lens of what academic literature describes as informal urban wild spaces, socio-ecological entities “with a history of strong anthropogenic disturbance that is covered at least partly with non-remnant, spontaneous vegetation”. Recognising the potential of these pockets of green space as key elements in rethinking urban nature and people-nature relationships in sustainable ways has led conservationists to adopt rewilding strategies. This approach aims to minimise and curate the impact of the anthropic factor in support of restoring natural processes and species, thus enabling landscapes to recover their ecological integrity and resilience. This strategy also increasingly aligns with European environmental policy priorities on biodiversity, climate adaptation, and sustainable urban development. 

The feral, accidental type of nature that thrived on the site is deeply tied to how Bucharest evolved as a city: Like many post-communist capitals, it has seen three and a half decades of rapid and chaotic land development.

The Bucharest Natural Park team draws inspiration for its projects from Berlin, another European city shaped by decades of division. The German capital is also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, whose ideas underpin the New European Bauhaus, one of the EU’s policy and funding initiatives for green, sustainable development in built environments. During a field visit to Berlin, researchers from the Romanian NGO observed how strong law enforcement, adequate funding, and cooperation between authorities and civil society can transform urban ecology. At the same time, the comparison highlighted Bucharest’s remarkable biodiversity: “We were surprised by the lack of insects, and therefore of birds. There is little biodiversity in Berlin, which shows it’s very difficult to rewild areas that have been heavily industrialised – like railway infrastructure. Even if these areas are currently protected, they don’t have the biodiversity we still see in Bucharest,” Neagoe explained. This insight reinforced two priorities: stronger institutional commitment to enforcement and funding, and broader public education about the ecological value of Bucharest’s feral nature.  

Scaling up rewilding  

Transversal cooperation has played an important role in protecting the Văcărești Nature Park, but the fight to protect Romania’s ecosystems is far from over. “The most difficult thing after having a success story is to see how to grow, how to scale it so that it becomes a network of stories, at the city level,” said environment minister Diana Buzoianu at an event in May 2026 marking the 10th anniversary of Văcărești gaining protected status. To further support the park’s ecosystem, its administrators, along with city authorities and civil society, are implementing a transnational project that will integrate rainwater collected from neighbouring areas in the wetland water system. This effort aims to enhance both the ecosystem’s resistance to drought and the neighbourhood’s resilience to flooding. Through the same project, the park will be connected with other green-blue areas of Bucharest.  

Building on the Văcărești experience, the team at Bucharest Natural Park identified five more neglected areas – Băneasa forest, Petricani Meadow, Dâmbovița Floodplain, Saulei Valley, and the Dobroești Reedbeds – totalling more than 1300 hectares. In 2024, the NGO launched the Bucharest Rewilding programme to develop a network of rewilded urban green spaces, with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the human and non-human inhabitants of the city and its climate resilience. 

On 30 July 2025, Petricani Meadow became the first of these sites to gain protected status. Despite its modest size of just 5.6 hectares, the area hosts hundreds of plant, insect, fish, bird, and mammal species, including 44 protected ones. The nature park is accessible to the general public even as conservation and monitoring efforts are underway alongside volunteer-based environmental education. Dan Bărbulescu, director of the Bucharest Natural Park NGO, says this approach is needed for the project’s continued success: “Conservation and monitoring of natural spaces should go hand in hand with public visitation, for awareness raising, so people can understand why these areas should be preserved and what their contribution to a better quality of life is.”  

Lasting threats 

Yet challenges remain. In Bucharest, the value of green spaces is still largely assessed in terms of their leisure function and surface area. Bărbulescu warns that this approach overlooks their role in climate adaptation, biodiversity support, and long-term urban resilience. 

The Băneasa Forest illustrates these tensions. Covering roughly 1,100 hectares on Bucharest’s northern edge, it has been one of the city’s most accessible escapes into wild nature for generations of Bucharest residents. More than a century of logging, habitat fragmentation, and encroaching transport infrastructure and real estate development led to drastic ecosystem degradation. 

A tiny remnant of ancient forests that spread centuries ago from the Subcarpathian Hills all the way to the Danube and once a thriving ecosystem, Băneasa has seen a massive loss in biodiversity. Dan Turiga, a forester and activist with Agent Green, a Romanian environmental conservation NGO, describes it as a forest that has lost its apex predators: “This is a forest in which red deer used to live. They need a large circulation area and a quiet habitat. We still have roe deer, they are smaller and more adaptive, but they also became inbred because of the isolation of the forest from other bodies of forest.”  

Recounting memories of his grandmother, who used to hear wolves howling near the village she grew up in, located at the edge of a forest not far from Băneasa, Turiga adds: “These forests, Băneasa included, used to be a habitat for wolves, badgers.”

The forest’s presence in Bucharest’s collective memory has helped sustain public attachment, but in the absence of coherent policy, efforts to safeguard Băneasa have largely translated into repeated cycles of civic pressure rather than stable protection. One such wave of pressure led to a partial victory in 2020, when the forest was reclassified by the Romanian Forestry Authority as a park forest, essentially stopping industrial lumber exploitation and only allowing less invasive silvicultural treatments, like dead wood removal. “I think it’s a small step forward. Not sufficient, though, because the forest is still exploited for wood, at the edge of legality,” explained Turiga. He also believes that a long-term ecological vision for the preservation of Băneasa is absent, which poses a constant threat to the forest’s ecosystem.  

Bucharest demonstrates both the risks of fragmented governance and the latent potential embedded in spontaneous ecosystems.

Last year, the fragility of this protection became evident with the reemergence of an old conflict: a forest road illegally built and later opened by the local forestry authority for public car traffic. The road was officially justified as infrastructure serving forest exploitation, but in practice it provided a shortcut for residents of a nearby residential compound that cut directly through the forest. Over the years, pressure from real estate developers on local authorities had proved strong enough to keep the road open for months in a row several times, until public pressure and law enforcement managed to get it closed. The latest toll contract that opened the forest road to vehicles started in September 2025.  

According to Turiga, the ecological impact of opening the road for vehicles was immediate and severe. Daily car traffic disrupted animal movement, trapped emissions within the forest canopy, and generated high levels of dust from the gravel surface, affecting both wildlife and people using the forest for recreation. More fundamentally, he argues, the road should not exist at all as it was partially built after industrial logging stopped, and thus its legal justification has been flawed from the beginning.  

The debate around the road has also revealed deeper governance failures. “When it comes to managing the Băneasa Forest, it’s essential that managers, forestry personnel in general, regain a high degree of professional conscientiousness and ethics, which lately has been questionable,” argued Turiga, referencing the caving in of forestry authorities to the pressures of real estate developers.  

An analysis from the Ministry of Environment’s Control Body, released in February, concluded that the section of the road built after 2020 – and the toll contract enabling public access – were illegal. The report concluded that the road should be returned to its original state. Subsequently, the Romanian Forestry Authority banned vehicle access to the road in April.  

Yet even as these governance failures persist, the process of formal protection has begun to take shape, under continued public pressure. In September 2025, environment minister Diana Buzoianu announced plans to designate Băneasa Forest as a protected area, framing it as a vital green asset of the capital. Civil society once again proved an important actor in this process. Since the beginning of 2025, biologists from the Bucharest Natural Park Association have conducted a scientific study that could serve as a basis for efforts to grant the forest protected status. Biologists identified 207 animal species living in the forest, out of which 45 are protected, as well as 80 plant species. The study, officially filed for evaluation with the Romanian Academy in March 2026, signalled a transition from advocacy to institutional procedure, but the outcome remains uncertain.  

According to Buzoianu, the project is part of a broader policy initiative aiming to extend stronger protection regimes to peri-urban forests across Romania. “This project will show that we can have a common mission – civil society, the ministry, local mayors – all these actors must work together,” the minister stated. Yet, as the unresolved road dispute illustrates, the translation of such commitments into enforcement remains uncertain. 

Why rewilding matters 

Băneasa Forest is part of a broader ecological system that enhances Bucharest’s capacity to cope with climate stress. When announcing plans for its protection, Buzoianu warned that “If we don’t protect the Băneasa Forest, Bucharest will become a microwave oven.” The metaphor may be blunt, but it captures measurable reality: in a city increasingly exposed to heatwaves, large forested areas function as temperature and humidity regulators.  

Together with Văcăresti delta, Petricani Meadow and other wild ecosystems, Băneasa forms a fragmented but functional network of green-blue spaces with systemic effects. Various connected green spaces allow species to circulate through the hostile urban environment, expanding biodiversity beyond the limits of any single site. In this sense, rewilded areas extend far beyond their recreational value, operating instead as distributed environmental infrastructure.  

Above all, these areas serve as protection for those who are most vulnerable to environmental stress. They matter most for the elderly and children during heatwaves, people with chronic illnesses, and those living in poor housing conditions. Moreover, the mental health benefits of easy access to wild ecosystems carry particular weight for those who lack economic or logistical possibilities of accessing wilderness outside the city: low-income families, people with disabilities, caregivers or new parents navigating restricted mobility. Rewilded areas offer psychological relief without the commercial component often associated with traditional parks or natural spaces located far from the city.  

While large ecosystems such as Băneasa or Văcărești operate at a metropolitan scale, rewilding in Bucharest is also unfolding in smaller, more distributed forms. Children’s Forest Association, an environmental NGO focused on urban reforestation across southern Romania, is developing microreforestation projects across overlooked urban plots, transforming them into dense, biodiverse patches that concentrate ecological functions within limited space. “I see two main benefits,” explains Teodora Pălărie, president of the association. “On one hand, microclimatic regulation, and on the other, biodiversity. These are pockets of biodiversity – we even call them pocket forests. Think of a pocket dictionary that you carry with you: small enough to fit in your hand, but holding an entire language inside.”  

By planting between 25 and 30 native species typical of southern Romania, these sites compress ecological diversity into highly visible, educational environments. This density not only strengthens ecological resilience but also shapes perception: “When you see so many different species per square metre, you become curious – you start noticing differences between a linden, a birch or a poplar tree; you want to find out more about that little forest surrounding you,” she noted. 

These micro-forests function as tangible climate infrastructure. Pălărie added that research and field observations suggest that once such a patch extends over roughly three hectares, it can influence the surrounding neighbourhood, lowering summer temperatures by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius while moderating winter extremes. Just as importantly, they reduce the amplitude between day and night temperatures, a factor linked to soil degradation and desertification. “I often tell people who take part in our planting events to imagine the forest like the hair on a camel,” Pălărie explained. “It protects against strong solar radiation and reduces day-night temperature differences, helping soil maintain structure.” Even at smaller scales, these interventions act as local refuges: shading streets, buffering wind, increasing air humidity through evapotranspiration, and creating pockets of cooler air that can be directly experienced during heatwaves.  

In Bucharest, there is a strong and growing public demand for direct engagement with such spaces. Approximately 240 volunteers participated in a recent planting event, out of which 140 were children. As a scout leader said while coordinating his team, “Planting events don’t happen that often, maybe two or three times each spring. They’re rare, and there’s huge demand. All the centres in Bucharest want to come, so as soon as we hear about one, everyone rushes to sign up.” The enthusiasm reflects the perceived value of such hands-on environmental experiences as educational and community-building tools.  

The vision of the “Cool Bucharest” project, which is currently being developed by Children’s Forest Association, is to locate many of these micro-forests in accessible spaces – museum gardens, social service centres, and courtyards – where entry would be free and unrestricted. If funding is secured, these sites could function as everyday climate shelters. “Once you bring nature into the city, through Miyawaki miniature forests for example, or through rain gardens or urban meadows, you create a network,” Pălărie argues. “The power of that network is much more achievable than the possibility of having a single 50-hectare park in Bucharest. Nobody will offer such a large space.”  

Together, large protected ecosystems and micro-forests distributed in between begin to outline a different model of urban green infrastructure: one that is layered, connected, and designed around ecological function rather than surface appearance.  

From an administrative point of view, rewilding can also be economically beneficial. “Using native plant species is financially efficient – they are adapted to our local climate and, if they are also perennial, it means we don’t have to make yearly financial efforts to keep some areas green,” explained Anastasiu of the Romanian botanical garden.

Bucharest’s shades of green  

Ecologists argue not for replacing classical parks, but for diversifying the urban green-blue infrastructure. Both designed parks and wild urban areas offer access to nature and climate resilience, but they do so in various proportions and through different means. Structured parks tend to prioritise accessibility, aesthetics, and spaces for outdoor play and sports, while rewilded areas allow ecological processes to unfold more freely, strengthening biodiversity and climate adaptation capacity. “Well-managed parks alternating with wild spaces is the way to greatly increase the green-blue areas in Bucharest. That’s what we are working for in the Colentina Lakes area, by maintaining Saulei Valley and Dobroesti Reeds as wild areas to alternate with the classical park restoration that is projected to take place there,” explains Bărbulescu of Bucharest Natural Park Association, referencing other areas targeted for protection by the Rewilding Bucharest program. 

From the accidental emergence of Văcărești Natural Park to the contested protection of Băneasa Forest, Bucharest demonstrates both the risks of fragmented governance and the latent potential embedded in spontaneous ecosystems. Hosting almost 10 per cent of Romania’s population, the city would greatly benefit from integrating rewilding into urban master plans, climate adaptation strategies, and budgetary frameworks. Shifting responsibility from civic activists to public authorities and ensuring protection and legal enforcement for rewilded areas are key steps to take in that direction.   

The broader European context reflects the need for this shift. Nearly three-quarters of EU citizens currently live in urban areas, a figure projected to rise to almost 80 per cent by 2050. This demographic makes urban resilience one of the defining political and ecological questions of the coming decades. Bucharest’s trajectory suggests that sustainable cities will not be those that control nature most tightly, but those that learn to embed ecological complexity into urban planning.  

Over the past decade, the Hungarian government has staked the country’s economic future on the battery industry, providing generous subsidies for its expansion and the development of giga-factories. However, a major scandal involving systemic pollution at a Samsung plant near Budapest has raised questions about the industry’s practices. In response, the government has escalated the rhetoric of an already polarised election campaign.

The stakes of Hungary’s parliamentary elections on 12 April extend far beyond the country’s borders. If Viktor Orbán remains in power, he will continue to distance Hungary from Europe and deepen his increasingly autocratic political order. If he loses, Hungary might finally turn back towards its European allies, restoring the basic criteria of democratic governance, and breaking with its strategic alignment with Russia. The outcome could therefore have significant implications for the broader struggle between liberal and illiberal forces, both in Europe and globally.

Against this highly polarised background, it is particularly striking that an environmental conflict has emerged as a factor capable of influencing not only the dynamics of the campaign but potentially even the election result.

In February, the news portal Telex published an in-depth investigation presenting clear evidence of systemic problems at Samsung’s battery plant in the town of Göd, located just 15 kilometres from the administrative boundary of Budapest. Much like the election itself, the meaning of the investigation extends far beyond the immediate local context.

A state within the state

Samsung began producing batteries in Göd in 2017 at the site of a former TV-screen factory. After undergoing several phases of expansion, the plant has reached its current annual capacity of 40 GWh, making it one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe. In recent years, Samsung’s Hungarian subsidiary has consistently ranked among the country’s largest companies by revenue.

These developments were not financed solely through private investment. As part of its aggressive strategy to develop the battery sector, the Hungarian government has provided nearly 500 million euros in direct subsidies to Samsung’s Göd plant. These subsidies form part of a broader pattern. Since the early 2020s, the Orbán government has identified the battery industry, alongside automobile manufacturing, as a strategic pillar for Hungary’s economic future. To this end, it has taken extensive measures to attract battery manufacturers, primarily from East Asia, and especially from China, to invest in the country.

Direct state subsidies have been exceptionally generous: over the past seven to eight years, battery-related companies operating in Hungary have received nearly one billion euros in investment support. However, they are only one component of the government’s strategy.Even more important has been the extraordinarily favourable regulatory and administrative environment provided for the sector. Hungary has not maintained a dedicated Ministry of Environment since 2010; environmental authorities have been weakened and placed under political control; and meaningful oversight of the battery industry has effectively ceased at the national level.

As a result, the more than 50 battery-related plants currently operating in the country have repeatedly violated regulations without facing serious consequences. In most cases, these violations have either been concealed or resulted only in minimal fines that lack any deterrent effect. Samsung’s Göd factory, for example, operated for nearly seven years without the environmental permit clearly required under Hungarian law – an issue that environmental authorities never addressed.

The more than 50 battery-related plants currently operating in Hungary have repeatedly violated regulations without facing serious consequences.

Regulations have also been relaxed in several rounds. In response to pollution incidents associated with Samsung’s operations, the government introduced provisions allowing authorities to refrain from imposing penalties or suspending production – even in cases of confirmed legal violations and pollution, where Hungarian law would otherwise mandate such measures. Instead, authorities may conclude so-called “administrative agreements” with polluting companies, outlining future remedial steps while allowing production to continue uninterrupted in the meantime.

In effect, the battery industry has become something akin to a state within the state, whose interests override all other considerations. Civil society organisations and journalists who exposed pollution and regulatory violations have been subjected to administrative harassment and targeted by hate campaigns. Companies operating in this environment gradually adopted increasingly irresponsible practices, knowing they could count on the state’s protection.

Leaked internal documents revealed discussions among Samsung executives suggesting that a critical environmental NGO and the investigative outlet Atlatszo.hu, which had published reports documenting pollution, should be silenced using state instruments. Shortly thereafter, both organisations became the target of an investigation by the controversial Sovereignty Protection Office, whose report labelled them as foreign agents in language closely resembling government propaganda.

The establishment of battery plants across the country has triggered significant local protests, yet none have achieved lasting success. Government backing has consistently proved strong enough to push the planned investments through. As a result, Hungary has become one of Europe’s leading battery producers. Though this development has generated considerable social tensions, they have not been strong enough to influence national political dynamics. In the 2024 municipal elections, the ruling Fidesz party won comfortably in nearly all affected localities. Now, however, things might be starting to change.

A political earthquake

The revelations by Telex illustrated how  Samsung’s lax environmental and workplace safety practices led to a series of accidents at the plant, and to several instances in which workers were exposed to carcinogenic chemicals at levels 500 to 1,000 times higher than permitted limits. They also documented the plant’s close ties to the highest levels of government, and showed that the executive was fully aware of the conditions within the factory.

According to the investigation, Orbán’s close aide and “propaganda minister” Antal Rogán had even suggested at a government meeting that the factory should be shut down, fearing the political consequences of a possible scandal if its internal conditions became public.

The revelations triggered a political earthquake. For days, the Samsung affair dominated public discourse, pushing the ongoing election campaign into the background. Political parties were forced to respond and adapt their campaign strategies to the unfolding crisis.

The reaction of the Tisza Party – the largest opposition force and current poll leader – was predictable. On the one hand, Tisza’s leader and prime-ministerial candidate, Péter Magyar, presented the scandal as evidence that the government is corrupt and prioritises the interests of large corporations over those of Hungarian citizens and workers. On the other hand, he framed the affair as proof of the Hungarian state’s dysfunction: the authorities, he argued, are incapable of enforcing even the most basic environmental and workplace safety standards.

This framing proved fairly effective. It resonated not only with the Tisza Party’s broader campaign messages but also with the prevailing public mood. Consequently, the scandal likely strengthened the opposition’s criticism of the government, even if its precise electoral impact cannot be quantified. Although the scandal probably did not sway Fidesz’s core supporters, it may have intensified negative perceptions of the government among undecided voters.

The government’s initial response was characterised by confusion and denial. Péter Szijjártó, the minister of foreign affairs and trade, who had long been the government’s chief advocate for Samsung, dismissed the allegations as fake news, blatant lies, and the work of foreign agents. He also threatened legal action against anyone publishing or spreading the information.

However, the toothpaste could no longer be pushed back into the tube. The strategy of denial failed to contain the scandal; indeed, it only intensified it. The government’s reaction was widely interpreted as further evidence of cynicism and dishonesty, particularly since the original investigative article relied on numerous official and by then publicly available documents.

Firefighting and escalation

In the wake of the investigation, Fidesz withdrew from the campaign certain public figures who had been on the front line until that moment. Previously, the party had relied heavily not only on Viktor Orbán but also on the prominent presence of Péter Szijjártó and Transport Minister János Lázár. After the scandal broke, this arrangement abruptly changed. Szijjártó effectively disappeared from public view, as if he had never been part of the governing party’s campaign.

Another figure connected to the affair also modified his public presence. Bence Tuzson, the minister of justice and the incumbent member of parliament for the constituency that includes Göd, had any reference to Fidesz removed from his campaign materials – posters, public stands, and other promotional content. Now his messages depict a green and flourishing future for voters, while no link is visible between him and the government, despite the fact that he himself serves as minister. This strategy also conveniently circumvented Facebook’s restrictions on political advertising, allowing Tuzson to present his campaigning as quasi-“civic” activity.

Then Fidesz went on the offensive. The day after the publication of the article, a website suddenly appeared on platforms close to the party, registered under the name of the vice-president of the Tisza Party. The site displayed only a single image: an empty bed. Soon, it became apparent that the real target was Péter Magyar. Government-aligned propaganda outlets began suggesting that a compromising sexual video involving the opposition leader would soon be released.

For days, increasingly wild theories circulated, including allegations of a homosexual relationship and the involvement of a minor. Eventually, Magyar himself clarified that the video likely depicted a consensual sexual encounter with a former partner – someone whom Fidesz had previously used in attempts to discredit him. The video was ultimately never published.

It remains unclear why the material was withheld. Perhaps internal polling suggested that releasing it would harm Fidesz more than Magyar, raising concerns about violations of privacy and illegal surveillance. Or perhaps the website had already served its purpose: diverting attention from the Göd scandal. According to media analyses, Google search statistics initially showed intense interest in the Samsung revelations, but these searches were soon overtaken by queries related to the alleged sex tape.

As a first firefighting measure, the diversion proved effective. Yet public interest in the story gradually faded, Fidesz’s polling numbers did not improve, and the Samsung scandal remained on the public agenda, though at a lower intensity.

Fidesz therefore escalated its campaign tactics. On 19 February, the Budapest Fidesz released an AI-generated video on its Facebook page, depicting a young girl waiting for her father to come home. The imagery is rendered in bleak, grey tones. Meanwhile, in a muddy battlefield under pouring rain, the father, blindfolded, is executed with a gunshot to the head.  The perpetrators remain unidentified. The message, however, is clear: Brussels, Ukraine’s President  Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Hungarian opposition want to drag the country into war, while only Fidesz can protect Hungarian families.

In the final weeks of the campaign, the government has shed any remaining restraints. As Viktor Orbán fears for his hold on power, virtually any radical step now appears conceivable.

Although the mass distribution of AI-generated content – fabricated videos, images, and messages – had already been part of the Fidesz campaign, this video marked a new and troubling low point.

By March, as polling data continued to deteriorate, Fidesz adopted even more dramatic measures. The party replaced its earlier anti-war rhetoric with a narrative emphasising the immediate military threat allegedly posed by Ukraine, thereby laying the groundwork for potentially radical measures justified by a supposed state of emergency. In effect, the campaign shifted from calls to remain outside the war to the cultivation of a direct war psychosis.

This shift was accompanied by provocative actions that appear to violate both international and Hungarian law. One such incident involved the seizure of a Ukrainian cash-transport vehicle legally transiting through Hungary. Authorities confiscated 35 million euros and 40 million US dollars in cash, as well as nine kilograms of gold bars.

According to reports by the investigative outlet VSquare, three agents of Russia’s GRU intelligence service also arrived in Hungary to assist the government in influencing the elections, following tactics previously observed in Romania and Moldova. Such developments make Hungary appear increasingly similar to Russia rather than to other EU member states.

While these events cannot be attributed solely to the scandal surrounding Samsung’s Göd battery factory, they clearly indicate that, in the final weeks of the campaign, the government has shed any remaining restraints. As Viktor Orbán fears for his hold on power, virtually any radical step now appears conceivable.

Shaping public discourse

The emergence of an environmental conflict in the campaign does not mean green politics in Hungary is overcoming the deep crisis that followed its earlier success. It is highly likely that no Green representative will enter the Hungarian parliament after the elections in April. Environmental issues in general play only a marginal role in national politics. The government pursues a strongly anti-green agenda in both policy and political communication.

Moreover, the stakes of the 2026 election are exceptionally high. The campaign has not been dominated by policy debates but rather by propaganda in the style of Russian political communication: disinformation, smear campaigns, and intimidation. The opposition, for its part, has focused not on sectoral policy issues but on Hungary’s geopolitical orientation (EU versus Russia), corruption, and the collapse of public services.

Yet even in this environment, the pollution at Samsung’s battery plant managed to break through the overcrowded communication landscape and temporarily shape both the campaign and public discourse in Hungary, forcing both Fidesz and the opposition to respond.

The Tisza Party incorporated the issue skillfully into its campaign, but the scandal did not fundamentally alter its strategy. The Fidesz campaign, by contrast, was affected far more deeply, with the party launching diversionary actions to contain the damage. These may have been prepared in advance, but they were likely intended for a later stage of the campaign. Deploying the short-lived sex-video scandal so early in the campaign could hardly produce the same effect as it might have had one or two weeks before the election.

Finally, persistently unfavourable polling numbers – partly shaped by the Samsung scandal – pushed Fidesz to escalate its anti-war narrative to unprecedented levels. The party reframed its message from keeping Hungary out of the war to emphasising an immediate wartime threat and cultivating a broader atmosphere of war hysteria.

The Samsung affair demonstrates that even under conditions highly unfavourable to green politics, an environmental conflict can exert a significant influence on an ongoing election campaign – and may even affect its outcome.

One of the methods the EU uses to prevent overfishing and preserve marine life is limiting the power of fishing vessels. However, the effectiveness of these regulations is in doubt as they are often ignored or even cheated. With yields declining sharply in some areas and the livelihood of small-scale fishers in danger, is there a way to make compliance with fishing regulations the norm?

The trawler Nova Meda arrives at the port of Palamós carrying approximately 20 kilos of red shrimp. It is the star delicacy on the menus of restaurants in this fishing town on the Costa Brava, where in summer you hear almost more French than Catalan or Spanish. This shrimp is also an environmental badge of honour that Palamós has earned since eight years ago it devised a management plan to restore the size of this crustacean’s populations. The strategy worked, and the town has now become an example for other fishing communities.

At the helm of the Nova Meda is Josep Antoni Cruz, an atypical fisherman. First, because of his age. At 35, he brings down the average age of the local fishers’ guild. This naval engineer decided to pursue a master’s degree in fisheries management and follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers, going against one of the phenomena that most worries the sector: the lack of generational renewal. “We are the fifth generation of fishermen,” he says, including in that “we” his brother Carles, who works with him on the boat.

But what stands out most, at least at present, is his fight against a deeply entrenched dynamic in trawl fishing – a logic that some have tried to escape and encountered barriers in doing so: the widespread trickery involving engines in the Spanish fleet. Fishers generally acknowledge it openly. Their vessels carry engines with more power than what is certified and officially registered. Sometimes the real horsepower is double or triple that stated on the license. That was the case with the Cruz family’s previous boat: “We had another much larger boat, with more than 1000 horsepower, even though the license said 500,” he explains.

The Nova Meda, the boat he now operates, was the first in the town to comply with the regulations approved by Palamós fishers themselves to improve the condition of fishing grounds. Among the proposed measures, the management plan includes reducing engine power to 500 horsepower or less.

Although sailing with a more powerful engine than permitted is considered a serious offence, in practice, fishers complain that there is insufficient oversight by the authorities to ensure that the power on paper matches the real power. The main problem is that if only a few boats respect the legal limits, they are at a disadvantage because they cannot compete with others that have much more power and can therefore carry more weight, travel faster in the same amount of time (since trawling regulations allow a limited number of days at sea), and ultimately extract more fish from the sea.

“Everything here started in the 1980s. In our line of work, it’s very important to be the first to reach the fishing grounds. Whoever arrives first chooses where to fish, and the rest adapt. Toward the end of the last century, some began replacing their engines with more powerful ones, and the others followed so as not to fall behind. With more engine power, you could use larger nets, go further, and exploit areas that hadn’t been fished before,” explains Gerard Figueres, owner of the vessel La Perla de Palamós.

Ignacio Fresco, a fisheries policy specialist at Oceana, points out that this shift toward more powerful engines was also encouraged by subsidies at the time. “Fuel was subsidised, so having a more powerful engine wasn’t a problem,” he argues.

Distorting numbers

Figueres, who is also 35, has followed a path similar to Cruz’s. He graduated in nautical engineering and later studied the same master’s degree in fisheries management. He now continues the family business. Like Cruz, he has limited his boat’s power, mainly to combat the overexploitation of fishing grounds that earlier generations in his family had already observed. La Perla de Palamós is one of the few bottom trawlers in the Mediterranean operating legally. Its engine has 500 horsepower both in reality and on paper (499.9 according to the registry).

Although both see that the measures implemented to give ecosystems time to regenerate are gradually working – such as using trawl doors that reduce seabed destruction, increasing mesh size to avoid catching juvenile fish, or extending fishing bans – they believe they are still very far from the catch levels achieved by their fathers and grandfathers.

Above all, they highlight the importance of controlling engine power, especially as an alternative to highly controversial measures in the sector, such as the European Commission’s proposal to cut Mediterranean trawling days by 79 per cent in 2025. (Eventually, EU fisheries ministers settled on 50 per cent for Spain and France.) “Just by controlling engine power, fishing effort would be reduced to a minimum. If everyone used what’s on their fishing license, we might not even need to manage fishing by days,” Cruz notes.

He led by example, aligning the real engine power with the registered one. He had his old boat scrapped, paid for the dismantling, and used part of the horsepower capacity he had removed from the sea to regularise his new boat. The family spent 25,000 euros.

Beyond the cost, vessel owners encounter resistance from engine manufacturers. Cruz’s experience matches that of all the fishers interviewed for this investigation. “We changed the engine seven years ago, and they falsified the technical data sheets. On the license, we had 370 horsepower, and they installed an engine that claimed to be 370 horsepower, not 500. Even the emissions certificate was falsified – everything. When we went to buy it, we asked them not to do it, but they did it anyway. They’re used to working like this,” Cruz explains.

“At another supplier, which sells engines of seven or eight different brands, we asked for a 500-horsepower engine, and they told us they would install a 700-horsepower one. We insisted that we wanted 500. But they pushed hard, because they make more money selling one of 700. They tell you that you’ll catch more fish,” he adds.

In the Mediterranean, a recent Oceana report found that of 50 trawl and purse seine vessels analysed, 94 per cent exceeded their authorised and certified engine power, and 20 per cent exceeded the legal limits. This, the organisation observes, “completely distorts the calculation of fishing effort, the main management tool in the Mediterranean.”

Horsepower race

Asked about the number of sanctions imposed on vessels with more power than registered, the Directorate General of the Merchant Marine of the Spanish Ministry of Transport argues that it is unable to provide the data: “Operating with an engine more powerful than registered is a serious offence involving multiple administrations. Within maritime administration, this type of infringement affects various applicable regulations – such as marine pollution prevention, certifications, and so on – so there are no precise data on the sanctioning proceedings that have been processed.”

On the other hand, it is difficult to verify a vessel’s real power with data, since registries only reflect officially certified power. But vessel owners themselves acknowledge it. “People assume that the more you fish, the more money you make; that’s the mistake previous generations made, and it’s one we’re still making,” says fisherman Xavier Miró, already moored but still aboard his vessel, the Estrella del Sur. Like other cases in this fishing town, he is concerned about power fraud but has not yet been able to regularise the situation of his trawler, mainly because it is very expensive.

It is difficult to verify a vessel’s real power with data, since registries only reflect officially certified power.

Beyond Cruz or Figueres, asking vessel owners about engine power means assuming the answer will be twofold: the certified power and the real one. The Estrella del Sur has 427.9 horsepower registered. In reality, it has 700, Miró says. In any case, he claims to work at much lower power than his engine can deliver. “I operate at 550 horsepower.” He does so partly to reduce fuel consumption. “And I’m working towards regularisation,” he adds.

His boat has a German MAN engine. “Before, it had a [Spanish] Guascor with 420 horsepower. But then boats started arriving with 1400, 1500 horsepower, and of course, I said, with 400 I can’t compete; I’m going to change the engine and install a 500. That was my first idea. But then you talk to the engine supplier, and they tell you a 500 costs 12 million pesetas, and a 700 costs 13 million. I did the math and saw that I’d spend roughly the same on fuel and have almost 300 more horsepower.”

“In principle, I’ve bought the horsepower to reach 500, which used to be the legal maximum. The problem is that now they’ve pulled a trick and allowed it to go up to 900.” He is referring to Royal Decree 502/2022, by which the Spanish government raised the power limit for trawlers to 665 kW, equivalent to 904 horsepower – a measure questioned both by fishers fighting power abuse and by conservation organisations such as Oceana, which has long focused on engine fraud in fishing. At a time when the EU was advocating for reducing fishing effort to reverse the overexploitation of fishing grounds, this measure seemed to go in the opposite direction.

Thanks to the decree, Miró could legally register his vessel at 700 horsepower. But increasing from 427.9 to 700 would cost money: Miró would have to buy that difference either from the state or from other private owners (who can sell their horsepower quota on the market if they remove capacity from their fleet, either by scrapping or exporting their boats). This happens because the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy sets a maximum fishing capacity for each member state. Spain has a total of 964,826 kW (1,311,796 horsepower). Thus, if all vessels wanted to buy horsepower to regularise their situation, experts suggest there would not be enough available to do so.

Now, the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food says that a new amendment to the 2022 regulation will allow owners of vessels permanently decommissioned since 2018 – who, for various reasons, could not contribute their capacity – to do so. “This [extra] capacity could be used to regularise engine power,” the Fisheries Secretariat explains.

Tampering and manipulating

According to the Spanish Merchant Marine, the trickery also occurs during engine certification. Six companies are authorised to operate in Spain: Bureau Veritas (BV), Det Norske Veritas (DNV), Lloyd’s Register (LR), Registro Italiano Navale (RINA), Korean Register (KR), and China Classification Society (CCS).

“These organisations are directly called by manufacturers, distributors, workshops, or test benches to witness engine power certification tests. During these tests, engines are sealed at the maximum authorised power to prevent it from being exceeded, and the corresponding certificate is issued,” the Merchant Marine explains. “The problem lies in the fact that “on occasion, the initial documentation submitted by manufacturers or distributors has been manipulated to adapt it to the requirements of the fishing sector, as well as in the subsequent tampering with seals by the interested parties.”

In turn, certification bodies and engine manufacturers point the finger at vessel owners. The manufacturer Cummins claims to comply with legislation in all countries where it operates and states that “the responsibility for ensuring that a vessel’s operating license is accurate and up to date lies with the vessel owner.” “If a vessel owner carries out engine calibrations for operational purposes – such as changes in vessel weight due to additional equipment – the owner is responsible for complying with local legislation and updating licenses as necessary,” argues the company, which manufactures a widely used trawling engine.

We asked and followed up with representatives of other engine manufacturers, as well as all certification bodies authorised to operate in Spain. Of the latter, only the Norwegian DNV responded. “DNV certifies engines in accordance with recognised industry standards, regulations, and requirements. The scope of certification does not cover equipment operation, which is the operator’s responsibility,” a spokesperson says.

A European problem

Manipulation does not occur only in Spain but throughout Europe. In the absence of official data, interviews with experts in regulation and the fishing sector at the EU level indicate that hundreds or even thousands of vessels across the EU may be operating with manipulated engines or falsified documentation. “It’s comparable to modifying a car engine. But it’s also harder to detect, because you can’t see it from the outside,” says Steven Roos, an engineer at the Dutch certification company RDA Shiptech and an expert in technical inspections in Europe.

Manipulation does not occur only in Spain but throughout Europe. Hundreds or even thousands of vessels across the EU may be operating with manipulated engines or falsified documentation.

In 2017, the EU Court of Auditors raised the alarm, followed by the European Commission in its own report. In Spain, random checks revealed that the engine power limit was exceeded in one out of every two vessels. Data on power, length, vessel size, and catch volumes reported to the EU were also extremely inaccurate in France, Italy, and Scotland.

In the Netherlands, the Commission found that all vessels inspected with incorrect engine power had been certified by the same agency, whose name was not disclosed in the public report. Apparently, engineers from that same certification body also replaced seals on critical engine components after certification. In Ireland, the Commission observed that authorities apparently informed vessel operators in advance about unannounced inspections planned by the EU. In Greece, according to the report, authorities blocked inspections.

The example of Denmark also shows that fraud involving engine power is not an isolated case, its the opposite. Authorities identified serious enforcement failures around engine-power rules.

In 2024 Danish Court of Audits launched its investigation in April 2024 after clear that a number of mussel fishing boats in Limfjord in the north of the country were operating with illegally large engines despite the knowledge of the Fishiers Agency – yet no sanctions were applied.

But that’s not all. The Agency suspended engine-power controls in late 2022 and did not restart them in 2023 despite an internal recommendation. Additionally it gave the ministry factually incorrect information — and Parliament’s Environment and Food Committee was briefed with that incorrect information in two cases.

“It’s been a farce for 20 years, because there are boats with engines that, on paper, are so small that it’s completely impossible for anyone with even minimal fishing knowledge to believe that it could work,” explains David Lang, director of the Danish Small-Scale and Low-Impact Fishers’ Association and Producer Organisation.

Small-scale fishers around Lang have been drawing attention to the problem for years and have since faced serious hostility and threats. The European Commission has acknowledged that existing rules do not work. As a result, a revision of the EU Fisheries Control Regulation entered into force in 2024, aiming to strengthen sustainability in the sector. Governments have agreed that from 2028 onward, high-risk vessels in particular will be subject to closer monitoring, with onboard measurement systems that record engine power 24 hours a day. High-risk vessels include those using bottom trawls, as well as those primarily fishing plaice and sole in the North Sea, in especially sensitive but fish-rich areas known as the “Plaice Box.”

Steven Roos of RDA Shiptech is more concerned about the technical feasibility of this measure, as there are vessels in current fleets for which installing such monitoring systems is simply not viable. As a result, digital control would mainly affect new vessels. He nevertheless believes it could be a very effective measure if applied correctly. So far, however, this has been an obstacle in nearly all EU member states.

“The sea is finished”

There is a phrase Rogelio Santos hears more and more often in his fishing community in the Rías Baixas, on the southwestern coast of Galicia. Four words that sound like a verdict: “The sea is finished.”

This fisherman combines small-scale fishing with outreach work to reduce fishing capacity and preserve marine biodiversity. The problem with engine fraud is that it directly affects small operators like him. Santos speaks cautiously and avoids confrontation with those who work in other kinds of fishing generally considered more aggressive toward the marine environment, such as trawling.

Of his 48 years, he has devoted 30 to the sea. His father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers were all fishermen. “I’m at least the fourth generation,” he says in a restaurant in Porto do Son, in the Galician province of A Coruña. “These last two or three years have been the worst in our history, with the almost total disappearance of cockles and clams from all the Galician Rías, and mussels under threat as well – basically all bivalve molluscs.”

Santos identifies a combination of causes: years of pollution, the effects of climate change, and partly fishing overcapacity. “What’s sad is that many times there’s a set of rules on paper and a very different reality in the sector, where some people ignore the rules. And engine power is one of them.”

This investigation was carried out with the support of Journalismfund Europe.

The tendency to equate the “rural” with nature rubs up against the fact that non-urban areas have long been laboratories for the testing of destructive agricultural practices and other capitalist endeavours. Architects are now leading the charge in imagining new ways of creating sustainable rural life worlds. 

California’s Central Valley is haunted by a long history of landscape transformation. In 2023, 130 years after Tulare Lake – or Pa’ashi, as it is known to the Tachi Yokut Tribe who once lived there – was drained for agricultural purposes, it came back to life. Tulare Lake was once the US’s largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi. After California’s integration into the United States in 1850, the US government, along with settlers, used drainage techniques developed from European colonisers and enhanced by the steam power of the Industrial Revolution. The exposed land was then placed in private hands. 

But in early 2023, California experienced heavy winter storms followed by large-scale snow melt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range north of the Central Valley – both products of climate change-related phenomena. Water began flowing back into the Tulare Lake basin at a rate that the parched soils could not absorb and the drainage systems could not manage. Within weeks, arable fields of pistachio, cotton, and tomato were submerged. The historic lake was making a comeback. 

By the end of June 2023, Tulare Lake receded into history again, for now. A combination of state agencies implemented measures, including diversion and pumping, to move the water away from arable fields.

The flooding, however, prompted conversations about ecological and social justice in the region. There are calls from tribal and community leaders to turn parts of the lake into wetlands, with the aim of easing flood dangers, providing habitat for wildlife, and restoring the ancestral waters of the Tachi Yokuts. 

Tulare Lake is just one example of a rural landscape that was transformed by the displacement of native people and the technologies of the (long) Industrial Revolution for the purposes of agriculture. Today, many of these landscapes – particularly those that utilised drainage – are reaching the end of their design life and in doing so are disrupting established perceptions of ruralities. 

Correcting the rural record 

There has been a tendency to falsely conflate rural landscapes with nature, in opposition to the urban as the site of culture and technology. This perspective ultimately deprives ruralities of agency and imagination, depoliticising their past and future, and perpetuating their status as peripheries and sites of extraction for the urban “centres”. 

Architects and researchers are now challenging this narrow understanding of rural areas and urban-rural relationships, aiming to change the way we imagine non-urban futures. Their efforts are enabled by rapid advances in the accuracy and accessibility of open satellite imagery sources. The development and rollout of super-resolution models that use machine learning technologies to generate increasingly high-quality images from satellite data is making it possible to analyse rural landscapes in new ways. This information has been utilised across a multitude of sectors, from navigation to urban planning, as well as journalism and scholarly analysis. 

There has been a tendency to falsely conflate rural landscapes with nature, in opposition to the urban as the site of culture and technology.

Satellite imagery also enables greater visibility of remote areas and large privately owned land, both of which have been somewhat off-limits to analysts of the countryside and agricultural areas for decades. As Nathalie Pettorelli, a senior fellow at the Zoological Society of London, puts it, satellites “provide you with the opportunity to monitor the Earth globally and monitor aspects of biodiversity that were very much neglected before.”¹ 

Land grabbing then and now 

Some of the most forward-looking work using satellite imagery is coming from the field of architecture. The modelling skills that architects are trained in have harnessed the power of the “open source revolution” to develop new forms of analysis that hold truth to power. The Forensic Architecture project, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a key example of this developing praxis. This team of researchers investigates states and corporate entities using a practice that centres around the geolocation of data and the building of navigable 3D digital models and interactive maps. 

Since its establishment in 2010, Forensic Architecture has investigated cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. This includes the policies of European, national, and international authorities in relation to migration across the Mediterranean and the conduct of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers during Israel’s war in Gaza. 

One of its ongoing investigations focuses on the ecological destruction of Namibia’s grasslands from a human rights perspective. The researchers used a combination of historical photographs and oral histories to create 3D vegetation maps of the landscape in an area called Hatsamas, 60 kilometres east of the capital Windhoek, prior to the German colonisation that took place in the late 19th and early 20th century.² 

The researchers then used the same process to generate vegetation maps for the earliest available aerial images from 1972 and up-todate satellite imagery from 2023. They used these maps to create an interpolated map series in which each frame represented a year. With a video game modelling tool called Unreal Engine, they then created a navigable 3D model for each frame, which allows for an immersive and visual representation of the combined environmental and social repercussions of colonial policies, land use practices, and suppression of Indigenous lifeways. 

This research project from Forensic Architecture shows how novel modelling and visualisation techniques can make the relationships between environmental degradation and human rights violations much clearer than previously possible. In the Namibia context, the 3D models the researchers produced show that the genocide that began with German colonisation in South West Africa was not a single event but an unfolding process that evolved in a wider global political context, from imperial land grabbing through military campaigns to more insidious forms of dispossession and landscape degradation. 

The research also reveals the continuity between colonial and genocidal practices and the ongoing environmental and ecological destruction in non-urban areas. Landscape transformations that began with land grabbing, often at the hands of imperial forces, can be seen through these new methods as processes that escalate and evolve, first through military campaigns and later through the development of global trade and commerce systems. These systems perpetuate both the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the idea of non-urban landscape as a site of extraction. 

The military-agricultural complex 

The research that organisations like Forensic Architecture are carrying out reflects a growing interest in rural areas, one that is shared by landscape and building architects, as well as planners. The 2019 exhibition Taking the Country’s Side, commissioned by the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and curated by French philosopher and architectural historian Sébastien Marot, confronted the constructed division between the country and the city through an exploration of the formal links between architecture and agriculture. 

Formed of 42 panels, a large chronological frieze, a compass of scenarios, and a collection of short films, the exhibition emerges from Marot’s teaching on environmental history. Marot makes the case that agriculture and architecture both emerged from a move towards the domestication of plants and animals, and humans, during the Neolithic Revolution (10,000 to 12,000 years ago). This, as American political scientist James C. Scott highlighted in Against the Grain (2017), is the critical period during which humans became increasingly sedentary and, as a result, began to build and design landscapes and dwellings in a more permanent way. 

Both Scott and Marot document how agriculture, the planning of non-urban environments, and the design of social systems are intrinsically linked in pre-history and continue to shape our understandings and uses of non-urban landscapes to this day. 

Marot’s exhibition further elucidated the links between the military industrial complex and non-urban landscape design, highlighted by Forensic Architecture’s research in Namibia, through the integration of French agricultural engineer and critic Mattieu Calame’s research into nitrogen.³ 

Calame’s work highlights the significance of biochemical research in the 19th century that discovered the importance of nitrogen in plant growth. Bones are a key source of nitrogen, and this discovery led to gruesome campaigns from industrialised nations, in particular England, to pillage nitrogen reserves from catacombs and battlefields around the world to replenish the soil they had impoverished through monocultural farming practices. 

The efficacy of nitrogen in improving soil quality for industrialised farming led to a race by chemists to identify methods of converting atmospheric nitrogen. This was finally achieved in the early 20th century with the Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis, which made possible the production of ammonia-based artificial fertilisers. The technique was, however, very energy-intensive and was first used on an industrial scale during World War I for the production of munitions. This military-industrial process was then refi ned and redeployed for agricultural purposes in the second half of the 20th century. 

The new techniques in visualising and modelling non-urban landscapes make clear the links between military processes and agricultural industrialisation in the 20th century. In the period after World War II, tanks were repurposed as tractors, munitions production sites were transformed into a new pesticide and fertiliser industry, airfields and bunkers were converted into farms and farm buildings. 

Focus on the countryside 

Taking the Country’s Side didn’t just focus on the past. Much like Forensic Architecture’s research, it aimed to use its historical criticism to present new ways of imagining the future of rural landscapes. In particular, it presented a future scenario in which new rural commons disrupt the idea of the city as the primary site of democracy and civil life. Marot argues that this commonplace idea of the urban as the home of participative politics obscures a complex system of older rural practices, including issues around the management of common land. 

Marot drew on ideas from permaculture and agroecology to critique the metropolitan zeitgeist in which cities imagine themselves as the height of culture without understanding their interrelationships with the territories and life worlds that they depend on for resources. The idea of the future of the countryside, as a producer of both cultural and political material and resources, is also central to the Dutch radical architect Rem Koolhaas’s work on rural futures. 

In his 2020 Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, The Future and the accompanying book Countryside, A Report, Koolhaas explores the importance of ongoing social, cultural, and aesthetic transformations across the non-urban surface of the globe from an architectural perspective. As a key player in debates around the mass movement to urban areas in the 1970s and 1980s, Koolhaas is uniquely positioned to critique the underexploration of the rural. His work since 2020 asks important questions about what happened to the places that those who moved to the city left behind. 

From the mid-20th century, the world’s population has been rapidly urbanising. In 1960, more than 60 per cent of the global population lived in rural areas; by 2007, the distribution of rural and urban residents had equalised, and since then the share of people residing in urban areas has surpassed 50 per cent of the total population. Despite this, the non-urban presently accounts for 97 per cent of the world’s surface and is home to just under 50 per cent of the human population. 
 
Our focus on cities is likened by Koolhaas to the model of the relative sensitivity of the human body, where some areas – like the lips and eyes – are engorged and overrepresented and others – such as the hips and shoulders – are shrunken and under perceived. The revolution in satellite imagery and methodological advances in modelling are opening new opportunities to even this field by making visible and explorable vast areas of terra incognita that, since the 16th century, have been cut off from public access, use, and imagination by colonial projects both internal and external. From Namibia to the Scottish Highlands, these new methods and technologies are opening the countryside to the imagination in ways that have never before been possible. 

Intermediate places 

Koolhaas alerts us to the rapid transformations that are now occurring in the countryside. Far from the pastoral idyll, today’s countryside is the laboratory of the future, characterised by new patterns of ownership and seasonal migration, new vernacular architectures of data centres, wind and solar infrastructure, and smart farms, and new populist and right-wing ideologies. The city seems static in comparison.  

Like Forensic Architecture’s research, Koolhaas’s team utilised a mixed-methods approach, using open-source satellite data to investigate the non-agricultural rural. They chose an area of rural Holland, north of Amsterdam – arguably the image par excellence of a post-Enlightenment agricultural landscape – and created a detailed inventory of a 12-by-3-kilometre strip comprising several villages and the areas between them. 

Far from the pastoral idyll, today’s countryside is the laboratory of the future. The city seems static in comparison.

They discovered a new kind of rural landscape, characterised not by agriculture but by its “intermediate” status. By combining satellite imagery with other open-access data concerning business and economic activity as well as traditional ethnographic techniques, the researchers found an important gap between the appearance of, and everyday life within, non-urban areas. This is a place where the surface appearance of the place has no relation to what is happening at ground level, where former farm buildings are transformed into yoga studios and art museums, and workers’ cottages house white-collar commuters.  

Koolhaas and his team uncovered two interlinked transformations occurring simultaneously in this site. The area is increasingly appealing to young urban people attracted by a narrative of authenticity and nature; at the same time, farmers are diversifying their enterprises by relying more heavily on technological automation and reducing the labour time they dedicate to farming. This research highlights the intermediate nature of the countryside in our contemporary moment, where new forms of production and extraction are being laid on top of older geographies of power. 

Newly in possession of the rich visual data afforded by satellite imagery and the software advances of the open-source revolution, architects are uniquely positioned to help us understand what is occurring and what is at stake in the rural transformations that are underway. Their training in the philosophy and history of design of place allows them to identify where old patterns are being reproduced and to visualise these in accessible ways.  

The increasing geometric perfection of farming is one such form, highlighted by Koolhaas, that is of particular importance for debates around sustainable futures. With increased automation, we see higher standardisation of farming equipment and practices across the globe. There is also an ongoing entrenchment of the dynamics outlined in Forensic Architecture’s study of the Namibian context. Colonial processes of land grabbing and the development of extractive industries, from farming to mining for the military-industrial complex, are giving way to capitalist projects that use the same language of form. This is a utilitarian pattern visible across non-urban landscapes the world over, from missile sites to data centres, wind farms, and industrial agricultural areas. It is an architectural vernacular of rigour and functionality that hints at a wider totalitarian logic. 

Designing futures 

In my own research into present-day agricultural regions built on former wetlands, I have found the same grid-like system of monocultural fields sprawled across low-lying flatlands from East Anglia to California’s Central Valley.⁴ There are clear links between this form and the factory. In his writings on the shifts associated with the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution, Marx identified steam power as a key driver of capitalist labour organisation. Steam power, however, was not only used to mould society on the factory floor of urban areas; it was also a productive force that facilitated the draining of wetlands (deemed “waste” areas in Western European thought) through pumping machinery and allowed for an acceleration in the wide-scale transformation of these landscapes into industrial agricultural regions. 

These drained areas often act as key sites for food production and, as such, occupy simultaneously central and peripheral space in the national imagination. They are given nicknames such as “the breadbasket of Britain” in the case of the Fens in eastern England, or “America’s Salad Bowl” in California’s Salinas Valley. These sites are home to some of the most productive and high-value land in the world, yet the people who inhabit them experience economic, social, and environmental health issues that are intimately entangled with the landscape transformations that redesigned wetlands as agricultural powerhouses in the image of the factory. 

The work of Koolhaas, Marot, and Forensic Architecture highlights this form as a hyper- Cartesian order imposed on the countryside from the 16th century, when the sensuous was divided from the intellectual by Enlightenment philosophy. This has resulted in a formal landscape architecture characterised by the geometric lines of the military-industrial complex. 

The work of architects is imperative to imagining new ways of creating sustainable life worlds.  

The drained wetlands of my research are all reaching the end of their design life: the soil is degraded through ever-intensifying production, and the low-lying land is subject to flooding as a result of rising sea levels and increased snowmelt. The work of architects is imperative to imagining new ways of creating sustainable life worlds in these regions.  

This work is particularly important when we consider the design of sustainable futures. If our wind and solar farms continue this landscape vernacular of grid-like geometric forms, then we risk repeating previous extractive colonial processes. Perhaps the most valuable contribution that architecture can make is the synthesis of the large scale into questions about liveability, not only for human life but also for the ecosystems in which we exist. 

1. Augusta Dwyer (2021). “A boom in satellite technology is revolutionizing the way we see the Earth: And the data is opening new doors for landscape management and restoration”. ThinkLandscape / Global Landscapes Forum. 19 April 2021. Available at: https://thinklandscape.globallandscapesforum.org/51523/a-boom-in-satellite-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-see-the-earth/ ︎
2. Forensic Architecture / Forensis (2025). “The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia”. Forensic Architecture Investigation.
   15 August 2025. Available at: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-environmental-continuum-of-genocide-in-namibia. ︎
3. Sébastien Marot & Matthieu Calame (2020). “Inaugural lecture of the exhibition ‘Agriculture & Architecture:
   Taking the Country’s Side’”. EPFL / Archizoom. 26 February 2020. Available at: https://www.epfl.ch/campus/art-culture/museum-exhibitions/archizoom/inaugural-lecture-sebastien-marot-matthieu-calame/ ︎
4. Rowan Jaines (2022). “The Social Life of Agriculture: History Passes into Setting”. Discover Society: New Series 2. Available at: https://discoversociety.org/2022/03/09/the-social-life-of-agriculture-history-passes-into-setting/. ︎

The banning of harmful pesticides is one of the most important victories for health and the environment in Europe’s recent history. Yet as the push to reauthorise neonicotinoids in France shows, there is a real risk that restricted substances could make a comeback. The agrochemical industry is pursuing productivity at all costs, and the EU’s dwindling power in enforcing limits could pave the way for further deregulation.

Once, it was believed the only thing that could break up a French protest was summer vacation. But this year, the French rallied on – at least online – and their perseverance was rewarded.

For weeks on end, citizens mobilised against a provision in the so-called Loi Duplomb (“Duplomb Law”), which sought to reauthorise acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide long banned for its suspected negative effects on pollinators and human health. The law, framed as a way to simplify rules for farmers, would have reopened the door to using acetamiprid. A citizens’ initiative against the bill received more than two million signatures, making it one of the most supported environmental petitions in France’s recent history.In response to the public outcry, the French constitutional court decided in August to strike down the controversial part of the legislation.

Nevertheless, the Duplomb Law marks a dangerous precedent: a rollback of green policies. At the European level, key pillars of the European Green Deal have been watered down, delayed, or abandoned over the past year. At the same time, national governments are pressing on with their own deregulatory agendas in the name of pragmatic reforms, which, in reality, only serve the interests of large-scale agribusiness.

This shift accompanies a change in the balance of power. The EU’s recently proposed Multiannual Financial Framework (its long-term budget plan, MFF) would grant greater flexibility to member states in how they allocate funding – including in agriculture. Although framed as a response to emergencies and inflation, the move reduces Brussels’ ability to enforce green conditionalities, weakening already fragile mechanisms for accountability.

Yet this story isn’t only one of retreat. Environmental groups, small farmers, and civil society are mounting strategic resistance. Across Europe, the future of farming is being contested. So who is shaping that future, and on whose terms?

From ambition to retreat

When the European Green Deal was launched in 2019, it marked a bold step towards environmental sustainability across all sectors, especially agriculture. Flagship initiatives like the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Sustainable Use Regulation (SUR), and the Nature Restoration Law (NRL) promised binding targets for food system transformation, pesticide reduction, and biodiversity restoration.

But five years later, the political climate changed radically. With European elections looming, the EU Commission declared a strategic pause on Green Deal regulations in early 2024. This shelved or delayed several proposals, including a directive on soil health and regulations on food waste, while promising a “simplification” of CAP compliance rules. Major farmers’ unions, including FNSEA – the largest agricultural union in France – celebrated the move as a win for “common sense.” In the run-up to the elections, environmental policies were increasingly framed as elite overreach and a threat to the livelihoods of “ordinary farmers”. The resulting public sentiment became a political boon for right-leaning parties, particularly in rural regions.

Now, in 2025, much of the ambition of the Green Deal has crumbled. The SUR, which would have made a 50-per cent reduction in pesticide use a legally binding target, was rejected by the European Parliament after a relentless lobbying campaign. Leading the charge were Copa-Cogeca, the powerful umbrella organisation representing European farmers and agricultural cooperatives, along with major agrochemical industry groups. They argued the regulation threatened yields, put farmers’ livelihoods at risk, and undermined European food sovereignty.

By the time it reached the Commission SUR had already been watered down, and if passed, it would have been largely ineffective as mandatory crop-specific rules and a legally binding framework were missing from the legislation. It was officially withdrawn by the Commission in early 2024, prompting environmental organisations to call it the symbolic collapse of the Green Deal’s regulatory backbone.

On the other hand, the Nature Restoration Law survived, but barely. Passed in a weakened form in February 2024, the law lost its teeth during negotiations between the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament.  Several restoration targets, including those on peatlands and farmland biodiversity, became conditional or vague. Agricultural land was granted major flexibilities, thanks in part to lobbying by member states aligned with industrial farming interests.

Over the last two years, farmer protests have repeatedly broken out across Europe, driven by economic pressure, the advancing Mercosur agreement, falling incomes, and a sense of institutional neglect. In response, politicians have sought to “simplify” regulations, framing green policies as a luxury in a time of crisis. This crisis rhetoric has been a hallmark of the Right since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion, the concept of food sovereignty has been invoked strategically – not to empower local food systems, but to justify loosening environmental standards and pushing protectionist trade measures. This shift has allowed national governments to deflect attention from systemic problems in the agri-food model by pointing fingers at Brussels.

Now, the newly proposed MFF revision gives EU members more flexibility in allocating funds under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). While framed as a way to respond to inflation and crisis, the reforms also weaken the Commission’s leverage to enforce environmental conditions. Critics warn this could create a fragmented patchwork of rural policies, where some states push ahead with agroecology while others fall back on high-input industrial models.In other words, by weakening its own enforcement power and letting national governments take the lead, the EU has opened the door to deregulation dressed up as pragmatism.

The newly proposed MFF revision could create a fragmented patchwork of rural policies, where some states push ahead with agroecology while others fall back on high-input industrial models.

Calls for deregulation are coming from multiple fronts. In early 2024, Spanish farmers protested the EU’s pesticide bans that they said would put paella rice cultivation yields at risk. In addition, EU member states like Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Romania called for the reintroduction of banned pesticides in the summer of 2025. But by and large, the most ambitious regulation rollback attempt so far comes from France, and its Loi Duplomb.

Enter Duplomb

In early 2024, French Senator Laurent Duplomb introduced a bill promising to “simplify administrative procedures” for farmers. Officially titled “Bill for the Simplification and Reduction of Regulations Applicable to Local Authorities and Businesses”, the so-called Duplomb Law quickly became a flashpoint in France’s agricultural and environmental debate.

The bill claimed to reduce bureaucratic burdens and restore dignity to farming. However, beneath the language of simplification, critics identified a strategic push to dismantle environmental safeguards. Although the French constitutional court ultimately struck down an article that would have allowed France to reauthorise banned pesticides, including acetamiprid, its mere inclusion signalled a willingness to test the limits.

For the director of Générations Futures, a leading French environmental NGO campaigning against pesticide use and for sustainable agriculture, the timing of the Duplomb Law is no coincidence: “The collapse of the SUR and the failure of Farm to Fork left a vacuum. Laws like Duplomb are rushing in to fill it.” François Veillerette warns that even when censured, the risk of banned substances returning remains real. “The political will is still there. The strategy is simply shifting.”

Meanwhile, the pesticide industry itself has been quietly working to adapt (and thrive). One avenue for the return of banned pesticides is reclassification as biocides. This allows certain substances banned for agricultural use to continue circulating in domestic, industrial, or public settings, where regulation is less stringent. For instance, acetamiprid is found in common household items, like insecticides for home use. Other substances include propiconazole, used to protect wood from insects, or clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and imidacloprid, which are deployed as industrial insecticides. Moreover, some pesticides like Fastac, outlawed in France in 2020, are still being produced under industrial certifications and then exported abroad.

The pesticide industry itself has been quietly working to adapt (and thrive).

Veillerette says Générations Futures is preparing to challenge these cases one by one in order to prevent the pesticide industry from finding ways to reauthorise them for agricultural use. “It makes no sense to prohibit a molecule in the fields but allow its presence elsewhere. This loophole undermines both public health and regulatory credibility.”

Another overlooked detail is the possibility of a fast-track mechanism in the original Duplomb bill, which would have allowed for ministerial derogations for neonicotinoids – including acetamiprid and possibly flupyradifurone – with limited explicit constraints on the mode or length of use. Though this provision was not included in the final legislation, environmental groups remain concerned that such procedural tricks could reappear in future proposals. The concern is not only the substances themselves, but a broader shift in regulatory philosophy. “We’re replacing the precautionary principles [of regulatory authorisations] with a logic of efficacy [of production] at all costs – even when human or environmental health is on the line,” Veillerette says.

According to Kristine de Schamphelere, a policy officer for agriculture at Pesticide Action Network, the same strategy is underway at the EU level. “A similar TINA (There Is No Alternative) narrative is indeed also being developed over the last years, trying to force the EU and national governments not to implement EU law on pesticides, playing on the fear of food security.”

By framing environmental regulation as excessive or anti-farmer, the Duplomb Law won rhetorical ground even before its articles were debated. Yet as critics have pointed out, it is not small-scale farmers who stand to benefit. A spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne – a French farmers’ union advocating for small-scale, sustainable, and socially just agriculture – has told the Green European Journal the union supports administrative simplification. However, Thomas Gibert also added that “the deregulation of social and environmental norms doesn’t work for small farmers. We need these norms to protect us and our citizens.”

According to Gibert, the Duplomb Law risks deepening the structural inequalities in the farming sector. He argues that France is moving towards “developing an agricultural system that will squash out the small farmers, always favouring a large enterprise-controlled agriculture.”  To genuinely help smallholders, Gibert says it would be better to simplify CAP payments. “We cannot forget that what is really needed is fair livelihoods for our farmers. This is the only way our small farmers can make a decent wage, by fairly pricing their products,” he adds. “Minimum prices, as promised by Macron, are what our farmers need. All other propositions simply fall hollow.”

Lobbying and resistance

Since losing its absolute majority in the French parliament, president Emmanuel Macron’s government has relied on the support of Les Républicains, the conservative party from which Senator Duplomb hails. The Right has used this leverage to steer rural and agricultural policy towards its own priorities. Meanwhile, the government’s uneasy alliance with the powerful FNSEA has further blurred the lines between public interest and corporate influence.

In recent years, Macron has increasingly made concessions to the farming lobby in an effort to contain rural frustration. Take, for instance, the 55 million euros diverted from the organics sector to young farmers, without consulting those who were affected (although the organics sector also has young farmers of its own). However, these concessions have only given further legitimacy to the far right. Moreover, they have failed to bring stability to France, a country that has now seen five prime ministers resign or be forced out of office in three years.

But even though major national and international lobbies are pressing for deregulation under the guise of easing burdens on farmers – consistently framing green reforms as economically unviable or politically naïve – the public, courts, and scientific community remain firmly opposed to the reintroduction of banned pesticides. According to a survey conducted by the European Food Safety Authority, awareness of EU food safety systems has risen by six per cent since 2022, and 67 per cent of Europeans now consider pesticides among their top food safety concerns.

Although national and international lobbies are pressing for deregulation, the public, courts, and scientific community remain firmly opposed to the reintroduction of banned pesticides.

These sentiments culminated in the two-million-strong petition launched by 23-year-old student Eléonore Pattery. What began as a grassroots initiative quickly evolved into a broad civic movement: environmental NGOs like Générations Futures, France Nature Environnement, and PAN Europe lent organisational support, while figures like activist Camille Etienne, YouTuber Jujufitcats, and model Charlotte Lemay amplified its reach across social media. Ultimately, the petition and public outcry had a decisive impact on the Loi Duplomb.

With or without Duplomb

In the European Union, deregulatory agendas are now at the forefront of policymaking. From national laws like Duplomb to the EU’s strategic retreat from environmental ambition, the trajectory is clear: environmental protections are being reframed as obstacles to productivity, and “simplification” is increasingly a euphemism for deregulation.

The July 2025 proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) only reinforces these concerns. With cuts of more than 20 per cent to the Common Agricultural Policy, and new mechanisms giving Member States greater flexibility over how funds are spent, Brussels is relinquishing tools that once enforced green conditionalities. Critics warn it may enable uneven implementation, undermining shared goals for sustainability. France’s decision to uphold the ban on acetamiprid marked a clear victory for science and civil society. But it’s only one battle in a much larger confrontation over the future of agriculture in Europe. What is under threat is the possibility of livable societies where food is healthy and farmers are fairly paid.

The EU has long claimed to promote coexistence between wolves and other large carnivores and rural communities. In practice, however, its efforts have focused largely on compensating farmers for livestock losses rather than investing in long-term solutions. This reactive approach has failed and is now being used to justify dismantling one of Europe’s rare conservation successes.

In 2022, when Switzerland sought to downgrade the wolf’s protected status under the Bern Convention, the EU opposed it outright. Citing scientific advice from the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, Brussels argued the move lacked evidence and would endanger a fragile conservation success.

But two years later, those same arguments were discarded. By late 2023, the European Commission had launched a review, and in 2024 the EU itself proposed the very downgrade it had once dismissed as “scientifically unjustified”. What changed was not the science but the politics: rural depopulation, underfunding, and farmer discontent were amplified by conservative parties into a wider anti-green backlash. Under pressure, the EU abandoned its earlier defence of strict protection and coexistence, and gave way to political concerns.

The price of success

Over the past decades, wolves have spread across much of Europe, expanding from their strongholds in the Carpathian Mountains, the Dinaric Alps, and the Iberian Peninsula to western Europe and forming distinct populations that often cross national borders. This remarkable recovery has been made possible through strict protection under the Habitats Directive and the Bern Convention, which has increased wolf populations from around 12,000 in 2012 to approximately 21,500 today. It is one of Europe’s most striking conservation successes.

However, three years ago, the EU changed direction. In November 2022, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s European People’s Party (EPP) Group, supported by Renew, the European Conservatives and Reformists Group and far-right MEPs, warned that “growing populations of large carnivores are threatening traditional farming”. The following day, the European Parliament adopted a resolution urging the Commission to consider easing protections for wolves and bears.

A subsequent in-depth analysis formed the basis for the Commission’s December 2023 proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status. This culminated in the European Parliament’s decision to support the species’ downlisting from “strictly protected” to “protected” under the Bern Convention and the EU Habitats Directive, which took place in December 2024 and spring 2025, respectively.

Efforts to weaken wolf protection run counter to ecological evidence. Wolves, like bears, are apex predators and keystone species that keep deer and wild boar numbers in check, preventing overgrazing and allowing forests to regenerate. Their presence sets off trophic cascades that strengthen biodiversity and indirectly sustain plants, insects, and smaller carnivores across European ecosystems.

A stark example of politics overriding evidence came earlier this year in Sweden, a country that has arguably been in breach of the EU Habitats Directive for more than a decade. Sweden has permitted the annual culling of its wolf population while politicians have lobbied hard to downgrade the legal status of the species.

This summer, for the first time in six years, the Swedish government cut the national reference value for wolves from 300 to 170 individuals. The move was condemned by international scientists commissioned by the government to assess the consequences. They accused politicians of misrepresenting their findings and explicitly rejecting Sweden’s decision. They also cautioned that a population of just 170 wolves falls short of the requirements set out in the Habitats Directive for maintaining a favourable conservation status.

At the EU level, similar warnings have been voiced. Ahead of the Bern Convention in December 2024, the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (LCIE) warned that a downlisting of wolves under the Habitats Directive could set a dangerous precedent. Although wolf numbers have recovered, six of the EU’s seven biogeographical regions still classify their status as “unfavourable.” Likewise, of the nine transboundary populations monitored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), six are deemed vulnerable or near-threatened.

The LCIE has noted with concern that its 2022 report – originally cited to oppose downlisting – was later invoked to justify it. Yet, no meaningful changes in numbers or threats had occurred, and a 2023 assessment reported only marginal increases. In response, the LCIE warned that politicising such decisions undermines science-based conservation, describing the proposed downlisting as “premature and faulty.”

The cost of wolf attacks

Wolves may prefer vulnerable wild ungulates, but unprotected livestock make for easy prey, fuelling the perception of wolves as a major threat. The in-depth analysis recorded 65,499 livestock killed across EU member states, with 18.7 million euros paid out in compensation. Agrarian and right-wing parties have seized on these figures to demand weaker protections, tapping into rural frustration. Flemish Animal Welfare Minister Ben Weyts captured this mood after several ponies were killed within days: “At some point, from an animal welfare perspective, you have to dare to say that the price of protecting one species is too high.”

Still, Flanders shows that coexistence with wolves is possible. Wolf damage in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium peaked at 189 animals in 2021 but fell to 99 in 2024, an almost 50-per cent drop in just three years. According to Diemer Vercayie from Wolf Fencing Team Belgium (WFTB), this decline is closely linked to preventive measures, with roughly half of the fences in the Limburg pack’s core area now made wolf-resistant. Since the animal’s return to Flanders in 2018, WFTB has handled 1,400 applications and made over 700 fences wolf-proof. Professional farmers are reimbursed up to 100 per cent of costs through the Flemish Agricultural Investment Fund (VLIF), while hobby keepers receive up to 90 per cent via the Agency for Nature and Forests, with some support for maintenance.

The Netherlands, by contrast, delayed action for years. Fragmented governance and slow policymaking led to inconsistent measures, misinformation, and polarisation, with a national wolf plan only adopted in 2025. Farmers investing in protective fencing often risk stigmatisation for “accepting” wolves. Despite decades of EU rhetoric and scattered regional progress, many member states remain paralysed in polarised debates that have prevented them from implementing coordinated, practical solutions.

Human pressures are direly lacking

Across the EU, wolves are threatened by more than just political decisions. Habitat fragmentation, conflicts with shepherds and the tourist sector, and high mortality rates due to legal and illegal killings and road traffic accidents impact their populations. Wolves are estimated to kill approximately 56,000 domestic animals each year – out of a total of 279 million heads of livestock – equating to roughly three animals per wolf annually. Country-level livestock losses may be tolerable, but local hotspots can face heavy pressure. Wolf attacks impose hard-to-quantify indirect costs and emotional distress, and recurrent damage can undermine pastoralism, cultural heritage, and rural livelihoods.

Wolf attacks impose hard-to-quantify indirect costs and emotional distress, and recurrent damage can undermine pastoralism, cultural heritage, and rural livelihoods.

In Poland, efforts to support coexistence are carried out by underfunded and overstretched Regional Directorates for Environmental Protection (RDOŚ), which rely solely on national funds despite the availability of EU support. Over the past five years, no EU funds were channelled to RDOŚ by the National Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management for human-wolf related coexistence measures. WWF Poland stresses the need for stronger support for farmers, including more EU funding. Much of the outreach and education work is undertaken by NGOs and conservationists such as Piotr Chmielewski from Z Szarym za Płotem (“Wolf behind the fence”), who runs school and community programmes aimed at changing public perceptions. He notes that “words are a powerful weapon; wolves cannot defend themselves [against them].”

Shifting cultural attitudes is proving far from easy. In Poland, wolves rebounded after gaining legal protection in 1998, having nearly vanished in the 1970s. Yet illegal killings continue. Studies by Polish research institutes estimate that at least 140 wolves are poached each year, with the real toll likely much higher. Prosecution is rare, as overloaded courts and weak enforcement mean many offenders walk free.

One notable case is that of Lego. This wolf was shot by a hunter in August 2024, not long after becoming a father. The hunter claimed to have mistaken Lego for a red fox – an animal that can legally be hunted in Poland – but the case is still pending in court. As Chmielewski notes: “We only know the tip of the iceberg. These cases are extremely difficult to prosecute. Wildlife crime is still a relatively new area of law.”

Illegal killings of wolves are also becoming increasingly common in neighbouring Czechia. In May of this year, four wolves were found dead in the Jesenicko region, most likely from poisoning. The scenario in such cases is always the same: the police investigation goes nowhere, and the case is dropped. This is not only true of poaching, but also of a wide range of environmental crimes. The will, technology, and personnel to investigate them thoroughly and catch the perpetrators are often lacking.

The will, technology, and personnel to investigate [environmental crimes] thoroughly and catch the perpetrators are often lacking.

A borderless problem and flawed solutions

Despite differences in landscape, culture, and wolf numbers, the political and public narratives surrounding wolves are remarkably similar across EU member states. Opponents often portray wolves as a threat to public safety, fuelling fears of attacks on children and insecurity in rural areas – even though there have been no fatal wolf attacks on humans in Europe in the 21st century. Critics warn that such rhetoric spreads misinformation and undermines conservation efforts. Claims of “surplus killing” – wolves killing more than they consume – are used to paint them as vicious predators. As mobile coverage now extends to even the most remote pastures, farmers and shepherds are becoming increasingly exposed to these narratives via social media – a growing concern for NGOs combating misinformation.

Some critics of wolf protection frequently claim that the animal’s numbers are artificially inflated as a result of secret reintroduction programmes rather than natural recolonisation. Others go even further, claiming that rural life itself has worsened since the wolf’s return. Such arguments are used to press for tighter human control over wolf populations, which is framed as essential to restoring balance and safeguarding livelihoods.

These claims often gain traction in the media, amplified by unverified reports of wolf attacks. Alarmed by this trend, a group of Polish scientists specialising in wolf research and conservation issued a joint appeal in May 2025, warning: “We are concerned that information published in the media about wolves is often untrue, misleading, and misinforms the reader.”

And the notion that culling offers a simple solution is equally misleading. As an Italian park ranger observed, older wolves normally keep younger ones in check, so killing the wrong animal can destabilise a pack, triggering more attacks on livestock or causing lone wolves to roam unpredictably. Moreover, wolf populations often rebound quickly, making any effect from culling short-lived.

Still, some draw an even more complex picture. Paola Aragno of Italy’s Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) stresses that the impact of culling is largely psychological: At the same time, argues Aragno, “Banning culls won’t help coexistence.”  He believes that occasionally killing a wolf can make rural communities feel less powerless and more willing to accept coexistence measures, since they are “not only defending themselves but also striking back”. In Italy, ISPRA has set an annual ceiling of 160 wolves that may be legally culled, though the actual number could be lower once roadkill, poisoning, and poaching deaths are factored in. Wolf survival is already significantly reduced by these pressures, and while fringe anti-wolf voices dominate social media, many shepherds admit that culling has its limits.

While fringe anti-wolf voices dominate social media, many shepherds admit that culling has its limits.

Positive examples exist

Although the European Union is increasingly leaning towards culling, positive EU initiatives exist. Since 1992, EU-funded LIFE projects have tested coexistence tools including electric fences, guard dogs, and stakeholder engagement. A review of 135 projects across Mediterranean countries and Romania shows how such measures can be effective when properly implemented. Electric fences – such as those installed by the Wolf Fencing Team Belgium – were identified as the most effective non-lethal measure, while others showed only moderate success. Swedish research confirms that all fencing helps reduce wolf attacks, with two types offering the best protection: five-wire electric fencing and sheep netting reinforced with two electric wires, known as “predator-repellent fencing.” Despite these promising results, scientists stress the need for more research to identify the most consistently effective methods. Inadequate evaluation and reporting standards continue to make drawing reliable conclusions difficult.

In Italy, livestock guarding dogs (LGDs) have proven particularly effective in deterring predators. Most regions support their use, though funding schemes have driven up puppy prices in some cases. In areas like Central Italy, where wolves never disappeared and later recolonised much of the country, there is a strong tradition of breeding Maremmano and Samoyed dogs. While LGDs can be highly effective, their success depends on proper training, management, and committed handlers. In Poland, efforts to distribute Tatra Shepherd Dogs (owczarki podhalańskie) have had mixed results. Some dogs were raised more as pets than working animals, which limited their effectiveness.

Efforts remain scattered

Some national authorities in countries like France, Italy, and Germany provide data, guidelines, and educational resources to promote coexistence. Nevertheless, these efforts are frequently fragmented, underfunded, and poorly integrated into broader rural development policies. The European Platform on Coexistence and its regional counterparts have facilitated dialogue and promoted good practices, but participation is voluntary and is often undermined by political reluctance or distrust among stakeholders.

In the northern Italian alpine province of Trento, forest rangers actively support shepherds by providing information, fencing, and even livestock guarding dogs, an uncommon but effective approach. Just an hour away in South Tyrol, however, the autonomous province of Bozen has opted for a starkly different path. In 2023, it declared coexistence “irrational” on 1458 of 1500 alpine pastures. With only a handful of active shepherds left and herds often left unattended – practices dating back to when wolves and bears were exterminated – conflict with predators is intense.

The first Italian wolf culling occurred on 11 August 2025. Herbert Dorfmann, an MEP in the European People’s Party who comes from South Tyrol, has long been opposed to wolves and played a key role in shifting EU protection policies. Meanwhile, Matthias Prieth, one of the few local shepherds using preventive measures, says the real issue is the long decline of alpine grazing: “Alpine pastures were dying long before the wolf.” Though he admits he would shoot a wolf attacking his herd, he sees widespread culling as futile. Instead, the shepherd proposes linking subsidies under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to low predation rates to reward responsible herding.

The case of brown bears 

In addition to the wolf, brown bears have also come into the crosshairs of the European People’s Party. The ursine’s numbers have risen significantly in recent years, with an estimated 20,500 individuals now present across Europe – a 17 per cent increase since 2016. In its 2024 manifesto, the EPP – the largest European political family – made its position on the brown bear very clear: “We need new rules for the management of large carnivore populations, especially wolves and brown bears, including culling when densities reach unsustainable levels.”

The majority of Europe’s brown bears are concentrated in the Carpathian Mountains, spanning Romania, Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine. Other strongholds include northeastern Europe – particularly Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the Baltic states – and the Western Balkans, where populations extend across Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia. Smaller, more isolated groups persist in the Alps, the Apennines in central Italy, and parts of the Iberian Peninsula.

As with wolves, bears are increasingly portrayed as “out of control” in Central and Eastern Europe, fuelling public fear and political pressure for culls – even where proven coexistence strategies exist. Effective tools like secure waste management, electric fencing, education, and new technologies such as the “Human-Bear Conflict Radar” – a forecasting tool piloted in Bulgaria – offer non-lethal alternatives. Yet prevention is often overlooked. It was only recently that Italian alpine regions, especially the Trento area, improved their secure waste bins and public information for trekkers.

In July 2025, officials in Poland authorised the killing of three bears (a strictly protected species of large carnivore under national law) near homes in Cisna, in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship, which is home to the country’s largest bear population. Public and scientific backlash led to a reversal of this decision, but the case demonstrates how fragile bear protection remains.

What is the effect of tourism?

In 2024, bears and wolves respectively caused a total damage of 145,000 euros and 93,000 euros in Trento. Monica Fedel, a shepherd from the Trento area, recently reported that a bear had attacked one of her horses on an alpine pasture in the Brenta Dolomites. The bear startled the horse, causing it to break through the protective fences. She partly blamed the incident on tourists, as she was forced to lock up her four guard dogs at dusk for fear that they would attack a visiting trekker’s aggressive dog. She is not angry with the bear, though. Reflecting on the situation, she says, “He acts like a bear, the wolf like a wolf, and the shepherd like a shepherd.”

A 2021 EU LIFEstockProtect report confirms that tourists are a greater concern than wolves for many alpine herders, as tourism often disrupts livestock protection. Yet shepherds rely on visitors, since herding alone is unviable due to low prices and heavy bureaucracy. CAP subsidies largely support “landscape maintenance” through grazing, not production – sometimes encouraging fraud.

Nearby, in the highland pasture of Borca Bassa, shepherd Ivan Zanoni had just lost three donkeys to a bear. In tears, he said he considers each predation “a personal failure”, especially when one of the slain animals belongs to a friend who has asked Ivan to take care of it. With only one assistant and increasing costs, the shepherd believes the system is unsustainable.

Although shepherds maintain the scenic pastures that make the Alps a profitable tourist attraction, they still have to pay rent for using them. This is a significant cost on top of other expenses, including measures to make the land wolf-proof. “I don’t want to be paid to look after the pastures,” Zanoni says. “But I think that I shouldn’t have to pay if I’m the one caring and protecting them.”

The future of wolves and bears will not be decided by predators, but by whether Europe addresses these deeper challenges and chooses prevention and support over fear and politics.

This investigation was carried out with the support of Journalismfund Europe.

With the number of passenger vehicles rising across Europe, cities are grappling with air pollution, traffic accidents, and the loss of public space. In Spain, the city of Pontevedra has managed to overcome these challenges, surpassing national air quality standards and creating safer streets.  The key, according to the Galician municipality’s mayor, is an urban model that prioritises residents over cars – without imposing an outright ban on private vehicles. 

It is a bright summer evening in Pontevedra, a Galician city in the northwest of Spain. The air is filled with a contralto accompanying a live jazz show in a corner of the big town square. A few metres away, four teenagers play soccer with an orange ball that two younger children try to touch in vain. A family takes a selfie while, seated on a nearby bench, four elderly women are engaged in a lively conversation. The intervals between one jazz piece and another are filled with the chirping of birds that are attracted to the greenery around the fountain.  

Looking at the images of Pontevedra from the 1990s, with lines of cars stretching as far as the eye could see, it would be very difficult to predict a future like this. But since family doctor Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores was elected mayor in 1999, the Galician city has been implementing policies that go well beyond regulating vehicles in its streets. The goal, according to the 71-year-old mayor, is to recover public space for the people.  

“When we reclaim public space and guarantee universal accessibility, then people have autonomy,” the mayor says. A politician of the Galician Nationalist Bloc party (Bloque Nacionalista Galego, BNG), Lores is now serving his seventh mandate and is willing to run for an eighth in 2027. Galicia is mainly and historically ruled by the right-wing Popular Party, and is the birthplace of several of its national leaders, which makes the local leftist and nationalist BNG’s long rule in Pontevedra an exception in the region.  

When we reclaim public space and guarantee universal accessibility, then people have autonomy.

In December 2022, the Spanish government approved a royal decree requiring all municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to have a Low Emission Zone (LEZ) in operation. To improve air quality for citizens and reduce carbon emissions, the decree recommends measures such as restricting access for more polluting vehicles based on their environmental label and introducing traffic-restricted areas where entry charges apply.  

Spain adopted this measure to comply with the legally binding requirements of the Paris Agreement – the international treaty on climate change – more than six years after it entered into force in November 2016.  

Nevertheless, since Pontevedra was already fully complying with the air quality parameters laid out in the national Law 7/2021 on Climate Change, the city council decided to take a much more ambitious step: declaring the entire urban area (about 490 hectares) as a “reduced traffic zone”. 

On a sunny, fresh noon at the end of June in his city-centre office, Lores recalls what Pontevedra looked like when he first took up his duties: “It was literally a cars’ warehouse and people, especially those with disabilities and the elderly, couldn’t go out on the streets, because everything was occupied by vehicles.” 

While he speaks, the mayor mentions the 19th-century Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer, best known for the urban reform of Barcelona’s central Eixample neighbourhood, with its distinctive grid layout and symmetrical structure. Just like Cerdà, he views public space as an extension of the home.

Cars: a continental problem

More than 75 per cent of the EU population lives in urban areas, and this figure is expected to rise to approximately 83 per cent by 2050. With air pollution widely recognised as the most pressing health risk in Europe, curbing road transport emissions – responsible for 37 per cent of nitrogen oxide pollution – is crucial.  

The European Union has launched a number of initiatives to encourage cities to become cleaner and healthier. One of the most notable is the Green City Accord, which invites towns with a population of 20,000 inhabitants or more to commit to improvements in areas such as air and water quality, noise reduction, biodiversity conservation, and advancing towards a circular economy. The initiative also calls on cities to connect with a wider European network to facilitate knowledge sharing.  

Another initiative is the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities EU Mission, which is supporting 100 cities in the EU and 12 in countries associated with the Horizon Europe programme. The goal of the mission is to develop a pilot project to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. The solutions and models tested in these cities could then serve as an example, helping all European cities to follow suit by 2050, the year by which the EU has committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. 

There are also informal initiatives such as the Ciudades que caminan (“Walking Cities”) network in Spain, which is a non-profit open to city councils and other public administrations committed to walkability. The network provides participant cities with training and a forum for the exchange of information and experiences. It includes an online school of public space, and is responsible for managing and promoting Entornos escolares (“school environments”), Spain’s most important website dedicated to promoting child autonomy and urban mobility.  

Still, in spite of both top-down and bottom-up initiatives, the number of cars in our continent is growing: in 2024, the number of vehicles in the European Union exceeded 259 million, an increase of 5.9 per cent as compared to 2019. The country with the highest motorisation rate – that is, the number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants – is Italy (701), followed by Luxembourg (670) and Finland (666 cars). With a rate of 544 (although this is based on provisional data), Spain is below the EU average of 576. 

Defying the norm  

Meanwhile, in Pontevedra, the number of cars has consistently diminished in recent years. The city has also introduced regulations both restricting the purposes for which cars may circulate and adjusting the times when they are permitted to do so. 

When asked to name one of the best examples of what his administration has achieved in terms of prioritising pedestrians over vehicles, the mayor does not hesitate to mention the transformation of one of the main squares in Pontevedra. Next to the remains of the 14th-century Gothic convent of Santo Domingo lies the wide Praza de España, regarded as the city’s “kilometre zero” – the starting point of its main natural and historical routes. Nowadays, the site serves as a lively hub where on any summer day walkers, drawn by the frequent cultural events hosted in the city, meet with pilgrims of the St. James’ Way.  

Lores points out that at the end of the 1990s, about 26,000 cars passed by this square every day. Remarkably, many of these vehicles were simply trying to reach destinations out of town, such as the beaches of Sanxenxo – a touristic municipality some 30 kilometres away, as well as the mayor’s birthplace – and to do so they passed through Praza de España. But today, transit traffic and circling for parking are not allowed anywhere in the city, and according to Lores, only 800 cars reach the square on a daily basis. As he explains, the decision to prohibit passing traffic and divert it to beltways has led to a 40-per cent reduction in the city’s overall traffic.   

Only “necessary traffic” is allowed in Pontevedra: vehicles used for emergency and public safety, public services (including garbage and water trucks, etc.), transportation of people with reduced mobility, and accessing private garages are permitted 24/7. However, loading and unloading for commercial supplies, home delivery, transporting bulky objects, and house moving and related activities, are permitted only during certain hours. Free parking spaces are scattered all over the city so that people can temporarily stop while carrying out any of these activities. In case of violations, police have the option to issue fines of up to several hundred euros.  

“There is no place in town that can’t be reached by car, but only by those who need to, not those who feel like it,” Lores explains. And with his characteristic tone, direct yet polite, he adds: “The fact that you park your private car in a public space is crazy: if you don’t have room for your freezer, do you put it on the sidewalk?” 

In the order of priorities, all cars, including electric ones, come last in Pontevedra: “The entire pyramid of preferences was changed: pedestrians come first, then bicycles, scooters, public transportation, and only lastly private transportation.” Inspired by Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Lores has placed maintaining a “compact city” at the heart of his administration’s policies on urban expansion: concentrating most activities in the city centre, discouraging large department stores on the outskirts, encouraging mixed-use neighbourhoods instead of single-purpose zones (such as a separate ‘city of justice’), like Barcelona’s law courts complex and improving public transport. The aim is not only to reduce unnecessary car travel, but also to bring life to neighbourhoods and strengthen social cohesion. 

The entire pyramid of preferences was changed: pedestrians come first, then bicycles, scooters, public transportation, and only lastly private transportation.

Wandering through the downtown area on any working day, it is surprising to see the large number and diversity of shops, especially for a provincial city. Local boutiques, jewellers, florists, and bookstores all thrive side by side. 

In addition to the Galician municipality, some other European cities are also taking steps towards more sustainability. Freiburg, for instance, is well known for its sustainable policies, including its regulation of car traffic. In the vibrant university city in southwest Germany, the urban planning process involves local people, bikes account for about 30 per cent of all journeys, and one district – Vauban – is almost entirely car-free. Moreover, in 2019, Oslo became the first European capital to completely ban cars in its central areas. The city has expanded the public transportation network and eliminated hundreds of parking spaces, replacing them with benches, green spaces, and bike paths. 

In Pontevedra, pedestrians clearly take precedence in the centre – and in roughly a third of the city overall. There, the roads and the sidewalks are indistinguishable. For those who see it for the first time, it is startling to witness people walking in the middle of the street, apparently unconcerned, while cars slowly wait behind them until they spontaneously move and let them pass. No one honks; no traffic light is there to tell people when they can or can’t move. And no parking is allowed in the whole area between 6 PM and 8 AM. 

In the rest of the city, streets are single-track roads with wide sidewalks. Cars can stop during working hours for a limited time (15 minutes for services and 30 for loading and unloading), and parking is allowed between 9 PM and 9 AM. Traffic lights can only be found on the two-lane avenues on the city’s external ring, where pedestrian overpasses and roundabouts remind vehicles to slow down. Only ten minutes away from the city centre, an open-air parking area offers an alternative to the roughly 4,500 private underground parking spaces available in the city. In total, Pontevedra has more than ten free municipal parking sites and approximately 3,500 free parking spaces, all located within a walking distance of 10-15 minutes maximum from the centre. This is especially useful for people who don’t live in the city but have to commute from surrounding areas for work. 

Safer, healthier, and more accessible  

In 2010, Pontevedra was the first Spanish city to enact a speed limit of 30 km/h on all roads in its urban territory. At present, the limit is 10 km/h in the downtown area, “but only if there is no one around”, explains Daniel Macenlle, an ex-local policeman and the current director general for protection of citizens at the city council. “If there are people, then it goes down to six.” In the rest of the centre, the maximum speed is 20 kilometres per hour, while in other neighbourhoods, vehicles can go as fast as 30. 

The result is that there have been no fatal accidents on municipal roads for a decade. Today, according to municipality data, 73 per cent of children walk to school (including 44 per cent who go accompanied, and 29 who take the journey on their own). A 2012 study conducted in Denmark, involving 20,000 children and part of a bigger project on the links between concentration, diet, and exercise, found that those who walk or bike to school have higher concentration levels than their peers up to four hours later.  
In Pontevedra, as in other Spanish cities like Barcelona, “school routes” have been implemented for years. These spaces with specific signposts are located around schools to offer students the option of walking to and from school, alone or in groups. 

And the benefits extend to all residents: overall, the number of people who choose to walk or bike in the Galician municipality has risen from 66 per cent in 2011 to 90 per cent in 2021. Moreover, today about 70 per cent of all trips take place on foot or by bicycle. The city council also estimates that, since the end of the 1990s, CO2 emissions have been reduced by approximately 67 per cent. 

In order to know not only the distance by foot, but also the number of steps and the calories burnt to reach a location, people in Pontevedra can try to use Metrominuto.¹ The synoptic map includes information about the city’s historic sites, news (e.g. on recent international studies on mobility), and service information (like national subsidies for electric cars).  

Though it may be assumed that geo-referenced camera checks, fines and towing in place are extensively used to ensure road rules are respected in Pontevedra, most people interviewed said that the system works simply because people find that it is convenient. 

This is also true for businesses: “A city that is kind to you invites you to explore it and enjoy it. And when you walk around, you also consume,” says Andrés Martínez, 48 and owner of an optical shop in calle de la Oliva, one of the city’s more commercial streets. Andrés lives in the same building where the shop is located and parks his private car in its communal parking. 

A city that is kind to you invites you to explore it and enjoy it. And when you walk around, you also consume.

Another resident is 57-year-old Santi Cachadas, who has been selling fish at the municipal market for 30 years. He points out a different benefit of the city’s model: “People who come to buy pick up and leave, and that means an empty space where a new client can park, and so on, which leads to more movement.” Santi lives about three kilometres away from where he works, and every morning he leaves his car in a free parking lot, built by the Lérez river, and walks for 500 metres to reach his market stall. 

Still, it must be noted that two out of five business owners interviewed for this story, one managing a newsstand and one running an eco-products shop, say that their clients often complain about the fact that they cannot find parking spots.  

When asked why he thinks Pontevedra’s policies have succeeded, the mayor points to several factors: clear communication and education about the city’s goals, networking “with the most proactive and dynamic people in town”, carrying out participatory processes, and the decision not to ban cars outright. And he adds: “We carried out many projects to expand sidewalks and pedestrian spaces; as soon as the project was completed, the space was automatically occupied by activities. We also allowed cars that needed it to enter, and people who had doubts were relieved.” 

Replicating Pontevedra’s success 

Over the years, the northwestern Spanish municipality has received numerous awards for its good practices, including the UN-Habitat’s 2014 Dubai International Best Practices Award for Sustainable Development for its city model centred on people, and the 2020 European Commission’s EU Urban Road Safety Award for “impressively achieving zero road deaths between 2011 and 2018”.  

When invited to answer whether he thinks Pontevedra’s success is exportable, Lores quickly replies that each city has to find its own model and strategy, and that every external example needs to be translated. And when asked if there is at least some lesson he believes could serve as an inspiration for other cities, and if so, for what type of city, without hesitation he states: “Changing the paradigm by moving away from a town imagined for the cars back to one for the people”.  

This article was produced as part of the PULSE collaborative cross-border journalism initiative (coordinated by n-ost and OBCT) and in collaboration with journalist Alice Facchini.

1. Although I sometimes experienced delays when I tried to use the platform.  ︎

One of the main challenges facing today’s green movement is its difficulty in broadening its appeal beyond the highly educated urban middle classes. In France, parts of the rural working and lower middle classes are characterised by frugal daily habits and a reliance on the subsistence economy – like DIY and growing a vegetable garden. Yet they rarely call themselves “green”, as their lifestyle is often at odds with dominant environmental norms.

Why did you decide to study the rural working class? What are their characteristics?

Fanny Hugues: In my previous research project, I followed the day-to-day life of a forager for wild medicinal and aromatic plants in the Drôme [a department in southeast France]. I focused on her household but came to realise it was interdependent with others in the area. A single parent with three children to support, she lived on little money, with just the RSA [revenu de solidarité active – a welfare benefit for people on low incomes] topping up her modest earnings. She had relatively little access to legitimate cultural capital. By her social characteristics, she was working class. It was her case that made me want to keep working on these informal rural economies. And then came the Yellow Vests protests, which began in November 2018. While I was writing the draft for my thesis, the movement was in full swing and many voices were speaking up, particularly in the countryside. Voices of people who said they were struggling in the shadows. Which made me wonder: how do you survive with little money in the countryside? I wanted to look at the question through the lens of lifestyles and domestic settings.

Three-quarters of the people I’ve met in my current study are working class. They have little income and are characterised by their low social status and a disconnection from legitimate culture. The other quarter are lower middle class, because they possess cultural capital that is for the most part uncertified. I chose the label “modest thrifty” for the people I met. It speaks to their limited means and frugal habits. And it also points to people who don’t try to draw attention to themselves, who quietly get on with their lives, without trying to be noticed outside of their social circle. I met 44 people aged between 34 and 88 living in 31 different households. Half were women, half men. Half were in heterosexual relationships, half were single. Many had no children to support, or no children at all. These households live on or below the poverty line, defined as an income of 1120 euros a month in 2020. Their median income is 880 euros a month. That’s not much at all, but they have very little debt and the vast majority own their own homes. But these aren’t sumptuous properties: they’re often old buildings, sometimes inherited, that need serious work. They’ve been renovated to differing degrees by the modest thrifty, so they’re in various states of repair. They also include plots of land on which lightweight housing has been erected. These are mostly occupied by women who are not homeowners and who rent accommodation in the private or public markets. What characterises the modest thrifty, even those who don’t own their homes, is stable housing. They share one certainty: that they won’t be made homeless overnight. For example, tenants in the private market know their landlords, who are often their neighbours and aren’t going to just kick them out.

Among the modest thrifty, I identify four subgroups. There are the “precarious women”, the “retired farmers”, the “workers and smallholders” and the “little middles”. To meet them, I carried out a multisite ethnographic study in six French departments: Ariège, Tarn, Haute-Vienne, Finistère, Sarthe and Moselle. This gave me access to a number of mutual aid and mutual acquaintance networks – as well as different strategies for getting by in a rural environment – while also broadening the social diversity of the people interviewed.

For this work, you also conducted an ethno-accounting study. What does this methodology involve and how did it help you understand the modest thrifty’s attitudes towards environmentalism? 

Ethno-accounting was brought to France by Alain Cottereau and Moktar Mohatar Marzok in their work Une famille andalouse (“An Andalusian Family”), published in 2012. They were interested in what counts for people, how they assess the value of the things around them and how they make arbitrages. They took a highly precarious heterosexual household as a case study. A few years later, in 2016, the EHESS working group on this methodology led to the publication of a special issue of the Revue des politiques sociales et familiales entitled “Joindre les deux bouts” (“Making Ends Meet”). Still very active today, this working group is a forum for discussing ongoing ethno-accounting studies.

While the modest thrifty live on little money, they nevertheless draw on an abundance of non-monetary resources. By creating a series of charts, ethno-accounting lets us look at what we could call their “informal economy” from a statistical standpoint. For example, I studied a couple who survive on a single salary and unemployment benefits. Simon and Nelly have dependent children, but don’t drive and don’t own a car. To get around, they depend on Nelly’s father, who lives nearby. He takes them shopping and brings them wood and vegetables. In return, Nelly helps him with certain things: she cooks him meals and takes care of his paperwork. The couple can also get lifts from friends, and there’s also a bus that passes metres from their house. That’s why Simon and Nelly say they don’t really need a car and that having one would be worse because of the running costs. To understand the value of these practices and networks, I tried to calculate what mutual aid accounts for in their budget. I recorded time spent and money saved to factor in everything that falls outside of monetary exchanges and get a picture of what falls under the informal economy.

In my survey, I looked at donations, loans, salvage, DIY, home production (especially of food and firewood), as well as foraging and hunting, all of which are part of rural resourcefulness. This means frugal lifestyles characterised by low incomes and a significant reliance on the subsistence economy. For instance, home food production is a subsistence activity that includes growing a vegetable garden or orchard and keeping livestock, as well as cooking food and preserving it in jars and tins. In writing my thesis, ethno-accounting helped me get a sense of what sustains rural resourcefulness in the long term. It’s a genuine way of life defined by a set of practices rooted in socialisation processes and based on available resources – that supports household economies.

Ethno-accounting shows that time to oneself, at home, is crucial in this lifestyle. Because without time to do up one’s house, to salvage or repair things, to learn and watch demonstrations of skill, there is no rural resourcefulness. And having no spare time often means having to buy things instead. Strikingly, the time that the modest thrifty set aside for subsistence work takes priority over the time devoted to paid work. From a strictly economic point of view, I noted that it isn’t necessarily more cost-effective to produce one’s own firewood than it is to buy it. But the men who make firewood offer a folk reasoning for doing so that is not based solely on economic rationale, but also includes the practical (learning new skills or keeping fit), the moral (the value of work) and the symbolic (the local recognition that this activity brings).

What role does stable housing play in these lifestyles?

It’s a crucial aspect. For example, DIY involves salvaging items and materials from the side of the road, from the dump and from friends, or things kept after parents have died. All this salvage must be stored somewhere, either somewhere on the property or in a space dedicated to DIY. Storage depends on stable housing – in other words, knowing that one won’t be evicted in the medium or long term. These items are a source of wealth, a form of embodied economic capital. This sets apart rural resourcefulness from urban resourcefulness, as studied by the Collectif Rosa Bonheur. Rural resourcefulness is characterised by spaces of one’s own, which are legally owned and often extensive.

The domestic spaces of the modest thrifty stretch to surrounding forests, fields and rivers, where they go to forage, hunt and fish. They also include local domestic spaces that make up their “inter-subsistence” economy, to borrow Geneviève Pruvost’s term, which is based on non-monetary exchanges like swaps, loans or donations. These lifestyles rely on technical knowledge and practical skills, which are not shared equally, especially between men and women. DIY is about “making do with what you’ve got”, to repeat a phrase heard on several occasions during the study. It’s not about heading to the shop to buy exactly what you need and bringing it home. It’s about making do with your material resources, as well as relying on mutual aid from others. The modest thrifty always try to ensure things last as long as possible by maintaining and repairing them. These people don’t DIY out of necessity alone, but also because they’re curious to understand and learn, they’re looking to have fun, or they want to create something.

The modest thrifty don’t DIY out of necessity alone, but also because they’re curious to understand and learn.

What attitude do the modest thrifty have towards environmentalism?

In my initial interviews, I asked people to give me an overview of their lifestyle. And I also wanted to dig into their attitude towards environmental issues. So I asked: “Would you call yourself green?” or, “What does being green mean to you?” Sometimes there was a pause, some people didn’t know what I meant, while others pushed back. I realised that this term didn’t resonate with them and that I couldn’t just drop it into the conversation. So I approached the subject through other aspects of their lifestyle, like food, heating, and transport. And in the end, I understood this as a finding in itself: the modest thrifty don’t call themselves green.

How do you explain this rejection of the term “green”?

The modest thrifty are not indifferent to environmental issues. The reason they don’t call themselves green, despite leading very environmentally frugal lifestyles, is that they don’t identify with the dominant environmental norms advocated by the urban upper classes. Based on their class, gender, and generation, I identified among the modest thrifty different types of “moral ecologies”, all characterised by environmental norms at odds with dominant ones. The term “moral ecologies”, coined by the historian Karl Jacoby, refers to the beliefs, practices and traditions that determine how people interact with the environment. I focused on the modest thrifty’s attitude towards environmental issues, rather than trying to define their environmentalism based on their degree of adherence to accepted environmental norms. I was also interested in the permeability of their practices and discourses to these norms: were they re-appropriated or resisted? For example, the anti-waste moral ecology of the precarious women in the study adopted, to a limited degree, the environmental norms around waste, rubbish and recycling. These women espouse their own anti-waste norms, guided by a strong moral sense and impermeable to dominant environmental norms. And while their moral ecology is permeable to exhortations to reduce waste, they do not see solutions to the climate crisis as their responsibility. Ultimately, it’s about quiet resistance against these dominant environmental norms, but, for various reasons, the modest thrifty don’t always frame their frugal practices in political terms.

The reason the modest thrifty don’t call themselves green is that they don’t identify with the dominant environmental norms advocated by the urban upper classes.

Yet these people do point to various signs of the environmental crisis that they see in their day-to-day lives. The piles of rubbish in their neighbourhoods; the fact that they have to water their vegetable patches far more due to drought and lose some crops; noticing that there are fewer insects in the garden, or fewer rabbits, when before they were easy to hunt. It’s what we could call an environmentalism of the near. The “little middles” in the study, who have the most cultural capital, also talk about the exploitation of people and natural resources on the other side of the world to satisfy the needs of a few rich people. We can liken this to a demand for environmental justice.

What might the political demands of the modest thrifty be?

The term “quiet resistance” is important, because it refers to the idea that these people are not passive. They notice policy measures hindering their lifestyles more and more. Things like the ban on salvaging items from skips at dumps or restrictive legislation on lightweight housing. Their demands would probably focus on easier access to welfare benefits. For example, continuing to receive the RSA without having to do unpaid work as a condition, which would reduce the amount of their spare time spent at home and threaten their rural resourcefulness.

I think there would also be demands around transport. In all the rural areas surveyed, the modest thrifty lamented the poor provision of public transport, with buses that only come at 7 am and 7 pm, or not at all. Some brought up the price of petrol, stricter roadworthiness regulations, and the fact that vehicles are becoming increasingly electronic. No longer being able to repair one’s own car is a major problem identified by the study, one which was also shared by rural Yellow Vests. Rural resourcefulness is based on repair. Not being able to fix one’s own means of transport is just one of many other structural obstacles that make this lifestyle harder.

This interview originally appeared in L’écologie depuis les ruralités (“Ecology from a Rural Perspective”), a publication by the Fondation de l’Écologie Politique.

Translated from the French by Kit Dawson.

Albania’s modern history is characterised by dramatic political shake-ups, but one thing has remained constant through all the turbulence: the country’s lustrous forests are overwhelmingly public. This might, however, soon no longer be the case, as the Albanian government plans to privatise forests in order to bolster tourism. How will such a change affect the lives of rural communities in the region, and what are the wider implications for European forests?

Driving along winding roads in Albania’s northern mountains, solitary cars and occasional groups of bikers in search of adventure find themselves immersed in a vast, dark-green sea of pines, interspersed with chestnut trees, elms, and oaks. Situated in the county of Shkodër in Northern Albania, Fushë-Arrëze and Pukë count amongst the country’s greenest municipalities, the vast majority of their territories being covered by public forests.

In the past few decades, the resounding quietude of these lustrous mountains has been further amplified by the exodus which has swept Albania since it reopened after a half-century-long isolation under communist rule. Emigration has hollowed out rural areas, whose share of the country’s population dropped from 65 per cent in 1992 to 36 per cent in 2022. Shkodër county, for example, has lost around 40 per cent of its population since 2001. Moreover, from the 1990s onwards, over a million Albanians have migrated abroad, and between 2011 and 2023, the country’s resident population fell by about 420,000. Among those who choose to stay, many move to the capital Tirana – home to almost a third of the country’s total population – in search of better opportunities and economic prospects

“Every person who chooses to stay here is sacrificing their life,” says Ardmir Doda, the head of the Forestry Department of the municipality of Fushë-Arrëz and one of the most active figures in the local community. “Seventy per cent of my family has gone abroad, and I might follow. If things continue to go the way they are now, in five years, there will be no one left here.”       

In an effort to reverse this trend of depopulation, Albania’s government has passed the “Mountain Package”, an initiative encouraging individuals – especially members of the Albanian diaspora – to return home and invest in rural areas. As prime minister Edi Rama emphatically put it, the goal of the package is to “address the dream and desire [of Albanians] to return to the land of [their] ancestors.”

However, while most residents agree on the need for economic opportunities in the region, some question whether privatising forests is the way to go.

Ambitious yet ambiguous

The Albanian government adopted the Mountain Package on 13 March 2025. The nationwide initiative particularly targets the mountainous northern parts that have benefited the least from the boom of tourism in the country, which soared especially in the southern Albanian coast. For the symbolic price of one euro, the state will sell public forest areas to private investors, who will become their lawful owners provided they carry out projects aimed at developing touristic infrastructures in the region.

The initiative includes strong financial incentives for investors. The first 500 applicants will be granted a 10-year-long tax exemption, with no obligations to the state apart from social and health insurance for their employees. Investors will also benefit from 250 million euros in new financing from the Bank of Albania, with a 70 per cent collateral guarantee from the government.

Official texts on the package are ambiguous on the criteria that determine who can become landowners. They simultaneously state that the package concerns “factual possessors” who have “continuously used an area of  public forest or pasture in the last 10 years” while also explicitly mentioning emigrants, and widely including “anyone (…) with the desire and vision to build on their ancestral land.” However, interviewed municipality staff in Fushë-Arrëz and Pukë confirmed that the package is not limited to de factopossessors who are already using the land, and that there is no requirement that investors be residents in or even originally from the area.

A quest for luxury?

A couple of kilometres away from Pukë, a large pasture has been designated as the site for a luxury hotel. The vice-mayor of the municipality, Ferit Ringa, says local authorities have come to an agreement with investors whom he describes as “three brothers originally from Pukë, living in the UK where they own three high-end restaurants.” They are now awaiting the approval of the ministry of the Economy and hope to make it the first Mountain Package project in the region. Ringa is convinced that the project would bring positive developments to the local economy: “The hotel will buy products from Pukë’s farmers and hire locals,” he explains.

Elda Muco, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vilnius who holds a PhD in Rural Geography and Spatial Planning, sees things differently. “There is no legal guarantee that such luxury projects will involve locals, buy their products, and benefit them in the end,” argues Muco, whose doctoral thesis focused on northern Albanian rural areas. She underlines that touristic infrastructures in southern Albania, particularly luxury ones, often serve Italian food and import luxury products from abroad rather than buying from local farmers and businesses.

The Mountain Package was unveiled in Shkodër in March in the presence of prime minister Rama. During the meeting, an Albanian producer inquired whether the government would consider making it a requirement for recipients of public funds to buy, at least in part, Albanian products for their projects. Rama brushed over the question, saying “I am a socialist, but I am not one of those socialists who believe in government intervention in everything.”

The initiative aims to develop large tourist infrastructures and, as prime minister Rama has mentioned, transform agrotourism initiatives into “a luxury experience”. Ardmir Doda from the local forestry department believes this is the right approach: “We need to build resorts like in Turkey, but in our region, who has two or three million euros to invest? No-one! People here just want jobs, they don’t have projects.” Yet large-scale real estate and tourism development projects along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, particularly near Marmaris, have recently drawn a growing local opposition due to the damage they have caused to the local environment and traditional lifestyle.

Vullnet Kuci, the 32-year-old owner of a guest house in Pukë, believes in tourism of a different kind. “The people coming here are not after luxury; they are seeking authenticity, nature, tradition, good food, and simple local life,” he says. Kuci worries that the package will not guarantee any benefits for local farmers, and that luxury projects do not reflect the local lifestyle. “I am not interested in extending my guest house. I want to encourage other locals to build their own, so that as many of us as possible can participate in the development of the kind of tourism we want to see here,” he adds.

Muco concurs that the government should support such bottom-up, local-led tourism development projects and focus on multiplying smaller-scale agrotourism initiatives, which are more likely to respect the environment and benefit local residents. “They will buy products from farmers and hire locals because they actually know them. And they will prefer environmentally sustainable options because they know the value of their forests and the activities that are led there. But if you dispossess people from these lands through privatisation, they won’t care for it,” she adds.

Albania’s case is unique

The Mountain Package marks a turn in the country with the largest share of public forests in Europe. In the European Union – which Albania is aspiring to join – around 60 per cent of forest areas are privately owned. In Nordic countries, this share reaches 75 per cent. In contrast, only about 3 per cent of Albania’s forest area is officially registered as private property. Even in the Western Balkans – where the proportion of public forests is higher due to the region’s history of collectivisation – this low share of private owners makes Albania stand out.

But the forests in the region are threatened by more than a change in ownership. As in Albania, climate change is putting further pressure on the forests in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, which are already suffering from unsustainable practices such as illegal logging. In Serbia, damage caused by pests, disease, fire, and climatic hazards resulted in a 268 per cent increase in the loss of wood volume from 1966 to 2019. Bosnia and Herzegovina launched a large-scale project with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2022 to bolster the resilience of forest ecosystems through afforestation, conservation, and land restoration. Earlier this year,  Serbia followed with its own extensive collaboration with the FAO, targeting similar interventions to enhance the health and sustainability of its forest landscapes.

According to Elda Muco, even before communists took charge in Albania in 1944, only 6 per cent of Albanian forests had private owners. Public forests made up a large majority of the land and were organised according to customary law. Under this arrangement, some areas belonged to certain family lineages while all citizens could freely access and use the rest. In the north, forests and pastures were largely collective properties.

Under communism, all forests became state property and officially remained so after the fall of the socialist regime in 1991. But soon after, some locals started to invoke their ancestors’ customary right to collectively manage and use local public forests – an informal arrangement recognised to this day by local authorities. Still, only one per cent of the forests were initially returned to their former owners.

A social and economic lifeline

Whenever the children of Beslim and Bedrie – the 50-year-old owners of the local shop and cafe of Qerret – come back to the village to visit their parents, they plan family picnics in the nearby heights of the scenic Munella mountain. They also regularly pay their respects to their elders, buried in the local cemetery in the forest next to the village.

Forests are an essential part of family life and traditions, and they play a crucial role in the social cohesion of rural communities. In summer, one can easily spot shepherds leading their herds across forests towards cooler pastures higher up the mountains in search of relief from the hot weather.

These woods are also home to a wide variety of medicinal and aromatic plants, berries, and mushrooms, which represent a vital source of income. “One month of picking mushrooms pays for my coffee the whole year,” says 40-year-old Valdete, sipping her espresso at Beslim and Bedrie’s cafe. Valdete has been picking mushrooms every year since she was a little girl and accompanied her mother, as children often do in the region’s villages. She sells what she finds to Beslim, who acts as the village’s collector: he buys berries, mushrooms, and plants from the pickers and drives to the county’s capital Shkodër to sell them. Beslim estimates that these pickers collect 400 kilogrammes of blackberries per day, typically over a 20-day period in summer. This amounts to 8 tonnes every year, and most of the harvest is exported from Pukë directly to Kosovo and Serbia.

“Apart from remittances sent from their children who live abroad, the revenues generated from picking often constitute the entirety of the village households’ yearly income”, explains Muco. Moreover, she emphasises that picking “is a moment of socialising between women and children of the village” and contributes to the empowerment of rural women.

The geographer worries that privatisation would disrupt these traditional activities. “The pickers would not be allowed on private forest. And if tourists wander around beyond the limits of privatised property, it will make the women very uncomfortable,” says Muco. Responding to a request for comment, the EU Delegation in Tirana also expressed concern that the Mountain Package could allow “the development of large-scale infrastructure in public forests, pastures, and communal land, potentially creating conflicts with the local communities.”

Before a contract is signed, authorities from the municipality are supposed to consult local communities through their elected representatives. However, during my discussions with residents, I realised that many of them had never heard of the Mountain Package. Beslim, who is also Qerret’s village head, is one of them. He sighs in disbelief: “People would never allow such projects in the surrounding forests.”

The lack of awareness about this initiative profoundly concerns Marie Shkjau, the 62 year-old head and founder of a women’s group in of Qerret who cooperate to sell jams, juices, and various liquors made from the fruits they pick. Shkjau tries to raise awareness in the group, but laments that there is not enough information available. “Even when you explain it, it feels abstract to them – they don’t realise it could destroy the mountain and our traditional activities in the forest,” she says.

Eroded trust

The doubts and opposition that the Mountain Package faces are further fuelled by a distrust in the central government which, although widespread in Albania, is particularly strongly felt in Northern regions. In 2023, a poll found that only a minority of Albanians trust public institutions, with four out of five participants believing that both petty and grand corruption are widespread. The recent corruption charges against former Albanian President Ilir Meta, and earlier this year Tirana’s mayor Erion Veliaj, have only added to people’s scepticism.

This distrust naturally extends to government initiatives like the Mountain Package. The law requires that every application be registered in the public electronic system “e-albania”, so that citizens can follow every step of every project. But the government’s critics, Muco explains, see this transparency as a façade: “The package might be a mere rebranding of the ‘Law on Strategic Investment’ through which the government granted favours to supporters to thank them for financing their election campaigns.”

Northern inhabitants, who in this year’s general elections, much as usual, largely voted in support of the right-wing opposition, often say they feel “discriminated against” because of their political position. Previous infrastructural projects in the North, particularly hydropower dams and polluting mining sites, have strengthened the view among residents that their lands and natural resources are being exploited while receiving few benefits. The county of Shkodër (and Pukë particularly) is rich in water resources and streams, and is home to the country’s three main hydroelectric dams. But while these dams help generate and distribute electrical power across the country, locals in Pukë’s villages often complain of power cuts and issues with running water.

With privatisation on the horizon, these grievances are ever more acute. Locals and experts like Muco fear that the Mountain Package could disturb the collective use of their ancestral lands and, as other projects in their regions have shown, exploit northern Albania’s rich resources at the expense of its population.