The Bern Convention of the Council of Europe and the European Union’s Habitats Directive are the primary legal instruments driving species protection in Europe. The Habitats Directive implements the Bern Convention in the EU. While the Habitats Directive has stronger enforcement mechanisms than the Bern Convention, it covers a smaller geographical region. Through cooperation, each has used the other’s strength to compensate for its weaknesses. This dynamic interplay between these two legal regimes has most often been beneficial to the pursuit of both instruments’ conservation goals, particularly with regards to enforcement, funding, and capacity building. As the EU has grown in size and competence, however, it now essentially has the ability to direct the application of the Bern Convention. This outsized influence presents challenges to the institutional synergy between the two instruments and the continued functioning of the Bern Convention as an independent legal regime with policy preferences separate from those of the EU.

Legislation for the preservation of biodiversity has been instrumental to the recovery of multiple species and habitats. The European Habitats Directive 92/92/EEC is one of the strongest legal tools in nature conservation. This Directive seeks to achieve its biodiversity goals by requiring EU Member States to take measures to reach or maintain Favourable Conservation Status (FCS) of natural habitats and species in Europe. FCS is a legal concept, but must be understood and applied by scientists, managers and policy makers, and therefore a proper interpretation of this concept is crucial for biodiversity conservation and wildlife management. However, its definition contains several aspects that can lead to misinterpretation, being the core of controversies in determining whether or not populations have reached FCS. In this review, we provide legal and ecological clarifications of the most contested aspects of FCS that have not yet been conclusively settled by analyzing and weighting a variety of sources.

One of the key issues in the current controversy over the hunting of wolves in Sweden is whether the wolf population has reached favourable conservation status (FCS). FCS is a legal concept, created and defined in law, but like many legal concepts within environmental law, can only be understood by reference to ecological concepts such as species viability. These ecological determinations in turn often require some sort of legal or policy judgment, such as how great an extinction risk is acceptable for a viable population. This article interrogates contested legal and ecological aspects of FCS and argues for how they might be applied to the Swedish wolf in potential litigation.

The Stockholm Administrative Court recently ruled that Sweden’s wolf management policies are incompatible with the Habitats Directive. These policies are also the subject of an on-going infringement proceeding by the European Commission. The administrative court’s decision has been appealed. This case is significant for two reasons. First, it interprets controversial provisions of the Habitats Directive. But perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the growing impact of EU law in a member state. This was the first major case in which the national courts were able to review a hunting decision pertaining to a species protected under EU law because standing to bring public interest lawsuits for the protection of species has been recognized only very recently. Under traditional Swedish procedural law, only the government can represent the public interest in administrative decision making and in court. Here, Swedish courts finally applied to hunting decisions the CJEU’s holding in Slovak Brown Bear, which says that national procedural law must be interpreted so as to allow environmental NGOs to challenge administrative decisions that might contravene EU environmental law. The court did not request a preliminary ruling despite that fact that controversial questions of EU law were implicated however. While the court applied EU law, it preferred to maintain control over its interpretation.

Wolves are protected by law in both the United States (US) and European Union (EU). These laws restrict the harming or killing of individual members of protected species, but allow it in selective circumstances, such as when killing some individuals would benefit the species. In both unions, some states have argued that allowing the public hunting of wolves would in fact benefit the species by improving social tolerance for wolves, a claim that is currently the subject of controversy among scientists. In the absence of clear evidence that hunting is favourable for wolf populations, US courts have repeatedly struck down policies that allowed it. While hunting wolves to achieve their social acceptability is likely to also violate EU law, the EU court has not yet resolved the question and hunting for social acceptance continues in some Member States, such as Sweden and Finland. This article contrasts these legal responses to social ‘tolerance hunting’ and argues that the Habitats Directive should not be interpreted to allow tolerance hunting of strictly protected species. It then uses the contrasting legal situations to engage with the claim that the EU has become more ‘precautionary’ than the US on environmental matters.