You have today and tomorrow to respond to the very important consultation on the future of the EU Nature Directives.
There have been 445,000 responses online – a record for this type of EU consultation.
You will have a local nature site which is protected by these directives and it would be good to send a message to member state governments, including our own, that the nature directives are very important and are valued by Europeans.
A very impressive coalition of wildlife and environmental ngos has made this easy for you to do – click here and add your voice, please.
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What odds would you give on reaching the half million mark, Mark? If you were a betting man that is… 😉
See you at the Birdfair, no doubt..
What proportion ‘managed’ through NGOs & what proportion as individuals or representatives of organisations direct through the EU website or via NGO pre-answered route?
How many proclaimed conservation charities (eg G(WC)T or YftBs types) and how many respected and recognised ones?
No criticisms just observation.
More a series of questions than observations. I am not quite sure what point you are making.
I believe that the 445,000 figure given by Mark (now at just over 480,000) must be the count of people who have responded via the Nature Alert web-site i.e. NGO pre-answered route. I may be mistaken but I don’t think the number responding directly to the European Commission site is indicated. My own feeling i that half a million people all telling the European Commission how greatly they value strong wildlife protection laws in their own words would have more impact that half a million all providing exactly the same set of answers even though the latter are likely to be better informed and expressed. However, it is unrealistic to expect large numbers of people to give a detailed response to questions about the effectiveness of a European Directive (or two).
I was offered a predetermined set of answers by an NGO I belong to but chose to make my own bespoke submission. So maybe I’m one of the extra uncounted in the figures above.
Mud Lark, I don’t know if you looked at the response form yourself but it’s pretty involved – I work in the field and I had to think about some of the answers, it’s a very big ask indeed of the general public to reply in detail about a topic they care about but don’t necessarily have detailed procedural knowledge of.
I was also wondering if the responses should be “gamed” – in other words you can bet those lobbying against nature conservation have an party line, would shades of opinion within the nature conservation lobby be seen merely as divisions and disagreements to be exploited? I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were indeed spun that way. We’ll see.