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n een arrest over het Finse vergunningsbeleid voor de jacht op wolven geeft het Hof van Justitie uitleg over de betekenis en reikwijdte van een aantal omstreden bepalingen van de Habitatrichtlijn. De twee belangrijkste vragen betreffen (a) of het toegestaan is om vergunning voor jacht te verlenen om meer acceptatie voor grote roofdieren te bewerkstelligen bij de lokale bevolking en (b) op welk bestuursniveau (lokaal, nationaal, biografisch, grensoverschrijdend) de zogenoemde eis van ‘gunstige staat van instandhouding’ voor beschermde soorten moet worden bereikt. Daarnaast benadrukt het Hof van Justitie net als in andere recente arresten het belang van wetenschappelijk bewijs en de prominente rol van het voorzorgbeginsel. Met de vestiging van het eerste Nederlandse wolvenroedel in eeuwen kan de eerste vraag ook zeker relevant geworden voor Nederland. Het antwoord op de tweede vraag is voor Nederland – met zijn gefragmenteerde grondgebied en vele kleine populaties beschermde soorten – zelfs van fundamenteel belang. Het Hof van Justitie geeft meer duidelijkheid maar laat tegelijkertijd nog wel vragen open.

This article seeks to identify to what extent, and under what conditions, lethal wolf management can be conducted in EU countries without violating applicable European legal frameworks, in particular the Habitats Directive. The analysis carried out to that end demonstrates that certain variables are tightly related with the options of EU member states to allow the killing of wolves under the Directive, namely (1) the conservation status of the populations in question; (2) the quality of the scientific evidence showing that the various conditions of the Directive's derogation clause are met; (3) the quality of supervision and regulatory safeguards in member states’ hunting regimes and wolf plans; and (4) the extent and quality of intergovernmental cooperation targeting transboundary wolf populations. As these variables improve, so does the scope for legally viable wolf hunting.

After more than two decades of implementation of the Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC), some fundamental aspects of the directive are still unclear, and subject to interpretive uncertainty, which limit its correct implementation. For example, obligations for Member States in situations where a protected population has almost, or has just, gone extinct are unclear. The isolated and protected population of wolves (Canis lupus) in the Sierra Morena region in Spain – the only wolf population in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula – has been steadily declining to the point where it is doubtful whether any wolves are left. Using this illustrative example, we provide clarifications on the obligations by Member States in situations where populations are on the verge of extinction. Our analysis shows that Articles 6 and 12 of the Habitats Directive require Member States to restore populations that are quasi extinct. From a legal perspective, even the complete extinction of the species would not exonerate Member States from its obligations regarding the species in the Natura 2000 sites concerned. In this line, we argue that the Spanish authorities should not wait with recolonization, reinforcement and/or reintroduction actions until the complete absence of wolves in the Sierra Morena is conclusively proven. Two scenarios appear to meet legal requirements: i) active reinforcement/reintroduction, or ii) an active and effective policy towards a rapid natural recolonization of Sierra Morena by northern wolves. However, based on the observed wolf trends in Spain and Portugal during the past five decades, a reconnection between northern and Sierra Morena wolves seems unlikely in the foreseeable future even if actively promoted. Considering the urgency of actions required to avoid that this population will be the first wolf population to become extinct in Europe in modern times, in order to comply with European obligations, the adopting and carrying out a reintroduction/reinforcement scheme to restore the Sierra Morena wolf population is required. Such a scheme needs to be accompanied by a comprehensive enforcement plan to assure that reintroduced wolves will thrive.

In Norway, as in many other countries, a government-sponsored campaign against large carnivores was waged well into the twentieth century and eventually led to the disappearance of gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the country.1 By the 1960s, the species was considered functionally extinct both in Norway and neighboring Sweden. In 1971, wolves received legal protection under Norwegian law.2 Occasionally in subsequent years,wolves dispersing fromthe Russian-Finnish population made it into the Scandinavian Peninsula. In 1983, in the south-central Swedish–Norwegian border area, two of these immigrants produced a first litter of wild Scandinavian wolf pups again. The Scandinavian wolf population has been growing since and numbers over 400 individuals today, although only a small part of the population lives on the Norwegian side of the border. The threats faced by Scandinavian wolves include inbreeding, low levels of tolerance by some sectors of the rural public, and high levels of poaching.3 Since the official status of wolves in Norway switched from vermin to a protected species, wolf conservation and management has been an increasingly contested topic in the country, with the controversy generally peaking every time the Norwegian government authorizes a winter wolf hunt.4 Whereas some Norwegian citizens would like to seemanymore wolves in the country than the currently estimated 65– 68 animals (plus another 25wolves or sowhose range straddles the Sweden–Norway border), others would rather see them all disappear once more.5 The latest chapter in the Norwegian wolf saga began in summer 2016 when Parliament agreed on a new wolf policy. In the follow-up implementation of this national policy, the relevant RegionalManagement Authorities earmarked a total of 47 wolves—two-thirds of the national population— for culling in order to reduce sheep depredation, only to see the Climate and Environment Minister reverse this decision and reduce the number of wolves to be killed to 15.6 One international treaty has been an influential feature in debates on Norway’s wolf policy during the past three decades: the Council of Europe’s 1979 Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats.7 The discourse has, unfortunately, been affected by some tenacious misunderstandings concerning the compatibility of Norway’s constantly evolving wolf policy with the Convention. Our aim in this article is to reduce the confusion in this regard, in order to promote a constructive and well-informed debate regarding the future of wolf conservation and management in Norway. An added advantage of this focus is that it entails the legal analysis of certain features of the Bern Convention, the relevance of which extends far beyondNorwegian wolves, as they apply to European wildlife conservation at large.

Fences, walls and other barriers are proliferating along international borders on a global scale. These border fences not only affect people, but can also have unintended but important consequences for wildlife, inter alia by curtailing migrations and other movements, by fragmenting populations and by causing direct mortality, for instance through entanglement. Large carnivores and large herbivores are especially vulnerable to these impacts. This article analyses the various impacts of border fences on wildlife around the world from a law and policy perspective, focusing on international wildlife law in particular. Relevant provisions from a range of global and regional legal instruments are identified and analysed, with special attention for the Bonn Convention on Migratory Species and the European Union Habitats Directive.

As wolf populations expand across Europe, many countries face challenges in finding ways to address the concerns of some elements among the rural stakeholders who are being asked to share their landscapes with wolves for the first time in several generations. In these recovery landscapes, wolves are associated with a wide range of conflicts that include economic, psychological, perceptional, social, cultural and political dimensions. A recurring demand concerns the desire to introduce the use of carefully regulated lethal control of wolves, through either culling by state employees or hunting conducted by rural hunters. Introducing such measures can be very controversial, and many critics challenge their legality under the international wildlife conservation instruments that have nurtured wolf recovery. We evaluate this issue for the case of wolves in Norway, which are strictly protected under the Bern Convention. Drawing on the latest results of social science research, we present the multiple lines of argumentation that are often used to justify killing wolves and relate these to the criteria for exceptions that exist under the Bern Convention. We conclude that while the Convention provides apparent scope for allowing the killing of wolves as a means to address conflicts, this must be clearly justified and proportional to the conservation status of wolves so as to not endanger their recovery.

Many conservation professionals are familiar with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Ramsar Convention, and the World Heritage Convention. Regional instruments, such as those focusing on Africa, Antarctica, or Europe, are also conspicuous features of the conservation arena. Other international wildlife agreements focus on particular species, such as polar bears or albatrosses, or particular transboundary protected areas, such as the huge Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (see table 1). These agreements are collectively known as international wildlife law (Bowman et al. 2010). The binding agreements themselves are typically accompanied and informed by an evolving set of nonbinding instruments, such as Conference of the Parties (COP) decisions and action plans.

In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of the Regulation concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). Measured by the economic importance of the European chemicals industry and the environmental and health risks associated with it, the Regulation probably represents the most important piece of EU environmental regulation to date. We argue that the precautionary approach embodied in REACH has triggered a radical departure from past regulatory efforts that failed effectively to engage with contemporary regulatory challenges of scale, uncertainty, complexity and innovation. In effect, REACH is shaping a promising EU regime of responsive co-regulation that is without precedent in the forty-year history of EU environmental law. We believe that the success of this regime will not only determine the effectiveness of EU chemicals regulation, but more generally will come to determine the way in which EU regulation is likely to respond to a host of new technologies that shape our technological modernity.

Although the EU ETS has been operating now in three trading phases for ten years and has been extensively covered by legal research, there has been remarkably little attention for the enforcement of the ETS. Although, generally, we have seen an increasing centralization of the EU ETS, monitoring and enforcement still are largely in the hands of the emissions authorities in the states in which the EU ETS operates: 28 EU Member States plus Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland. This article reports on the main findings of an ex-post evaluation of the legal implementation of the EU ETS at Member State level with a focus on compliance. Our central research question was: Has the effectiveness of the compliance mechanism of the EU ETS improved in the third phase (2013-2020)? What further improvements (if any) are necessary? To answer this research question, we described the relevant EU law in each of the three phases, reviewed previous evaluations and relevant research projects, and evaluated the implementation of the EU ETS in selected Member States, both through existing sources and through interviews with key players in the compliance mechanism at Member State level. The Member States that we studied for the latter part of the project were Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Greece, Poland and the UK. We found many differences among the EU Member States and clearly Member States can learn a lot from each other’s attempt to close loopholes and fix weak spots in the compliance mechanism. Overall, more efforts should be undertaken to harmonize the practice of the national competent authorities responsible for the enforcement of the EU ETS. This is not easily achieved. The case studies clearly show that compliance assistance is regarded as the most important element of the compliance cycle of the EU ETS. Such compliance assistance is best offered at the national level in the national context. In addition, one could hold that the EU, with its extensive legislative framework for the EU ETS that was developed over the year, has exhausted its legislative powers in this field. Therefore, other forms of harmonization (e.g., network based peer review) need to be explored.

This article explores the prospects for the EU to develop a coherent policy regarding climate engineering (CE). To this end, we explore the most significant legal parameters derived from EU law from which such a future EU policy would have to arise. Obviously, in view of the principle of conferral, it must first be established if the EU enjoys competences to initiate a discrete policy on climate engineering. The mere fact that the EU presides over a plethora of climate mitigation and adaptation instruments is not sufficient to conclude that it likewise has competence to initiate a policy of intentional environmental change. Rather, precisely because climate engineering is such a different response to climate change than anything undertaken before, we must establish whether that difference is of a nature so as to rule out a future EU policy on climate engineering.

Het Hof van Justitie heeft zich in de zaak Briels e.a. gebogen over een prejudiciële vraag in het kader van een procedure aangaande het tracébesluit Rijksweg A2. Deze wegverbreding heeft negatieve gevolgen voor het bestaande beschermde areaal blauwgraslanden. Het tracébesluit voorziet echter in een mitigatieplan, omvattende de aanleg van een groter areaal blauwgraslanden van hogere kwaliteit dan het bestaande. De kern van het arrest gaat over de vraag of de in het tracébesluit voorgestelde beschermingsmaatregelen de schadelijke gevolgen mitigeren of dat deze maatregelen moeten worden aangemerkt als compenserende maatregelen als bedoeld in artikel 6 lid 4 van de Habitatrichtlijn. In deze bijdrage worden de antwoorden van het Hof van Justitie besproken in het licht van eerdere rechtspraak over de beschermingsverplichtingen die artikel 6 lid 3 en 4 van de Habitatrichtlijn met zich meebrengen. In het bijzonder wordt daarbij ingegaan op de rol die het voorzorgbeginsel vervult bij de interpretatie van dit artikel en de betekenis van het begrip compensatie. De bijdrage sluit af met een korte bespreking van de opmerkelijke vervolgstappen die Nederland als reactie op het arrest heeft genomen.

THE SWORD OF Damocles hovering over the European Union's nature conservation legislation has finally been stashed. Instead of “opening” the legislation for renegotiation, the European Commission will work to improve its implementation ([ 1 ][1]). The 1979 Birds Directive ([ 2 ][2]) and 1992