management so as to maintain their resilience to extreme climate events and to help
mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.
On the level of the legal system, this entails the need to make new rules that plan
and prepare future habitat protection requirements using no-regret management and
protection measures based on surveillance of climate change impacts and research
findings. It will also require the creation of a set of regulations that can be used to
react to unforeseen or extreme events in the spirit of “principled flexibility”. The
climate change specific integration of network coherence of planning provisions on
the regional, national, European and international levels as well as throughout the
relevant sectors of public and private land use is the corresponding superordinate
field of action that provides possibilities to control conflicting land use activities for
resilience improvement.
42 In the case of water law, climate change impact-oriented
regulations about adapting the objectives and undertaking long-term structural
adaptation of river basin management planning should explicitly be taken into
account within the legal framework.
43
However, making nature protection and water law more resilient to climate
change is politically challenging. A stricter protection regime will inevitably
cause conflicts with established economic and infrastructural land uses that may
themselves need to be reshaped and adapted to climate change. For example,
increased efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions can conflict with the interests of climate change adapted nature protection. Developments in the energy
sector involve more and more power lines, wind turbines, biomass farming and
water power use leading to increases in the amount and intensity of land use and
thus affecting natural resources, habitats and species. To achieve the challenging
and interrelated objectives discussed here, it could be beneficial to consolidate all
required new regulations about climate change-specific surveillance, coordinated
planning processes, the implementation of no-regret measures for resilience
improvement and instruments for controlling land and water use activities. This
consolidation should be flexible and guided by adaptation principles, and could take
the form of a single, climate change adaptation-oriented regulation that encompasses European environmental law generally, rather than involving the successive
and individual amendment of the respective legal acts. The political decision that
needs to be taken either way concerns the status of biodiversity protection when
conflicting legal rights and interests are weighed against each other – not neglecting
the fact that biodiversity, too, is of economic significance, but even more importantly, has a great ethical value of its own and is the foundation of our life on earth.
Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
42 See above, 4 (b) (cc).
43 See above, 4 (c) (bb).
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M. Gies et al.
mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.
On the level of the legal system, this entails the need to make new rules that plan
and prepare future habitat protection requirements using no-regret management and
protection measures based on surveillance of climate change impacts and research
findings. It will also require the creation of a set of regulations that can be used to
react to unforeseen or extreme events in the spirit of “principled flexibility”. The
climate change specific integration of network coherence of planning provisions on
the regional, national, European and international levels as well as throughout the
relevant sectors of public and private land use is the corresponding superordinate
field of action that provides possibilities to control conflicting land use activities for
resilience improvement.
42 In the case of water law, climate change impact-oriented
regulations about adapting the objectives and undertaking long-term structural
adaptation of river basin management planning should explicitly be taken into
account within the legal framework.
43
However, making nature protection and water law more resilient to climate
change is politically challenging. A stricter protection regime will inevitably
cause conflicts with established economic and infrastructural land uses that may
themselves need to be reshaped and adapted to climate change. For example,
increased efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions can conflict with the interests of climate change adapted nature protection. Developments in the energy
sector involve more and more power lines, wind turbines, biomass farming and
water power use leading to increases in the amount and intensity of land use and
thus affecting natural resources, habitats and species. To achieve the challenging
and interrelated objectives discussed here, it could be beneficial to consolidate all
required new regulations about climate change-specific surveillance, coordinated
planning processes, the implementation of no-regret measures for resilience
improvement and instruments for controlling land and water use activities. This
consolidation should be flexible and guided by adaptation principles, and could take
the form of a single, climate change adaptation-oriented regulation that encompasses European environmental law generally, rather than involving the successive
and individual amendment of the respective legal acts. The political decision that
needs to be taken either way concerns the status of biodiversity protection when
conflicting legal rights and interests are weighed against each other – not neglecting
the fact that biodiversity, too, is of economic significance, but even more importantly, has a great ethical value of its own and is the foundation of our life on earth.
Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
42 See above, 4 (b) (cc).
43 See above, 4 (c) (bb).
156
M. Gies et al.