Ranking MEPs for Nature Restoration Law
This is a historic opportunity. For the first time, the European Union is proposing to set binding targets for Member States to restore the EU’s degraded ecosystems in order to “bring nature back into our lives”, as promised by the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and translated in the «Nature Restoration Law».
The ENVI Committee, led by its chairman Pascal Canfin (RENEW group), is set to vote on the Nature Restoration Law on June 15 th 2023.
On this occasion, we measured the ecological performance of MEPs, with a focus on the members of the ENVI committee.
The Bloom team selected texts related to the climate, the ocean, and biodiversity adopted during the 9th legislature of the European Parliament (2019-2024). These documents are neither an exhaustive nor a representative sample (i.e., random) of the texts related to these themes. Instead, this list contains the texts we believe to be the most important in terms of their impact (positive or negative) on nature.
We included several amendments from each text if they met two criteria:
- Detailed voting results were available for the amendments.
- NGOs had issued voting recommendations for the amendments.
These two criteria allowed us to ensure that the amendments chosen were decisive. Only amendments of a certain importance are voted on by "roll call", i.e., where a group of MEPs request the publication of the details of the vote. The second criterion also allowed us to make sure that the MEPs could not ignore the impact their vote would have on nature as they had received advice from the NGOs. In total, 20 amendments related to 11 texts were selected and analyzed to rank MEPs.
For each amendment, points were awarded or withdrawn according to the vote of the MEPs, as follows:
Vote to Protect Nature +1 Vote to Destroy Nature -1 Abstention/Absence 0
The sum of these points was then calculated and calibrated to range from 0 to 20. In the calculation, care has been taken to consider the start and end dates of term of office. Some MEPs arrived during the legislature to replace MEPs who had begun a mandate in their own country or who had left the parliament because of Brexit. For these MEPs, only the texts passed during their term of office were considered for the calculation of the score.