A stress test of two directives: where the burden actually lies
The European Commission has put the Birds Directive and the Habitats Directive through a “stress test” — the two laws on which the entire Natura 2000 network rests. The stated aim is to identify the sources of unnecessary administrative burden. The consultation is open until 10 August 2026. The Via Pontica Foundation has submitted its position.
We will set out what we think on the substance. But before that it is worth establishing one distinction, because everything else depends on it.
Simplification and weakening are not the same thing
Administrative burden is measured in numbers of steps, deadlines, data collected twice over and legal uncertainty. The level of protection is measured in something else entirely — in the conservation status of species and habitats.
A measure that shortens a deadline or removes duplication is simplification. A measure that narrows the scope of assessment, weakens the precautionary approach or broadens the grounds for derogation is not simplification — it is a change of policy, and it deserves to be debated as such, honestly and with an impact assessment of its own.
These two things are easily conflated in a debate conducted around the word “bureaucracy”. Yet the difference is fundamental: the first makes the system better for everyone, the second simply moves the cost elsewhere.
The burden everyone complains about usually does not come from the directives
Here is an observation from ten years of work in the field: the same directive text produces drastically different burdens depending on the national administration applying it.
Where the standard data form for a site is out of date, where no management plan has been adopted, and where monitoring data are not publicly available in machine-readable form, every individual developer — investor or conservation organisation, it makes no difference — is forced to reconstruct the baseline condition of the site at their own expense. Every time from scratch. For every subsequent project. Again and again.
This is arguably the single largest source of unnecessary cost in the entire system. And it has nothing to do with the text of Article 6.
That is why we believe that the largest, most rapidly achievable and entirely risk-free saving lies in the data, not in the legal norms. Standard data forms, boundaries, habitat mapping, conservation objectives and monitoring results ought to be available as interoperable, machine-readable and regularly updated datasets, with the “once only” principle applied. All data collected should be at the disposal of every subsequent developer, without being paid for twice and without being gathered twice.
The benefit runs both ways and is immediate. Investors get shorter and more predictable procedures. Competent authorities and the public get comparable assessments resting on a common factual basis. Nobody loses. And not a single letter of the directives needs to be touched.
One thing that is barely heard in this debate
Article 6 procedures weigh not only on development projects. They weigh on nature restoration projects too.
An organisation restoring a wetland inside a protected site goes through the same procedural sequence as a developer whose project may have adverse effects. A project to restore a hydrological regime, to remove an invasive species or to build ecological infrastructure such as observation towers and hides pursues exactly the objectives for which the site was designated — and still it often follows a path comparable to that of an infrastructure development.
This is pure dysfunction. It makes precisely those activities that improve conservation status more expensive and slower.
And here is the risk we see: if the stress test proposes relief for economic activities alone, it will produce a result contrary to the aims of the directives themselves — and at odds with Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 on nature restoration, which the Union adopted only two years ago.
We know what we are talking about, because we sit on both sides of the table. We are a beneficiary carrying out restoration work inside a protected site and going through these procedures ourselves — we know the burden from the inside, as a duty-bearer. And we are a stakeholder taking part in consultations and spatial planning proceedings on the same territory — we know the quality of the procedure from the outside. That dual position allows a reasonably accurate judgement of where the burden is justified and where it is pure loss for everyone.
The Black Sea context
We work in a place that is rarely present in European discussions — the Burgas Lakes complex, one of the most important points on the Via Pontica flyway. From here we see deficiencies that cannot be observed from Brussels.
Black Sea populations are reflected in the annexes to the directives in an outdated or incomplete way. For some species — sturgeons, cetaceans — the situation in the Black Sea differs substantially from that of the same or related species in other marine regions of the Union.
The marine component of the Natura 2000 network is insufficiently covered. And the regime under the directives sits awkwardly alongside the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Water Framework Directive — three planning cycles over the same territory, each with its own terminology, deadlines and monitoring programmes, which afterwards cannot be compared with one another.
The Black Sea is no longer the sea the directives describe
Here we come to something that changes the whole conversation and that we believe must be said plainly.
Since February 2022 a war has been under way in the Black Sea. The consequences for marine mammals are severe and continuing.
What is documented. In 2022, 914 marine mammal deaths were recorded in the western part of the sea — a mortality rate 2.2 times above the 2019–2021 average. Monitoring by the Ukrainian organisation Ecoaction records 726 cases for 2022, 446 for 2023, 442 for 2024 and 931 for 2025. The situation, in other words, is not normalising. The fourth year of the conflict shows the highest recorded figure.
What remains outside the record. Recorded cases are not actual mortality — a substantial proportion of carcasses sink and never reach the shore. Along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, our own observations and those of partner organisations indicate findings in the order of dozens, and in certain periods hundreds. We have no basis for asserting higher figures for our stretch of coast, and we would not present extrapolations as established fact.
And this is exactly where the problem we consider most fundamental lies. Estimates circulating in the public domain diverge from recorded data by orders of magnitude. We are in no position either to confirm or to reject them — and neither is anyone else. For a sea basin in which factors with potentially catastrophic effects on entire populations have been operating for more than four years, the European Union has no coherent monitoring framework capable of answering how many animals have died. This is not a minor gap in the statistics; it is a blind spot the size of a sea.
What is killing them. Military sonar disrupts the echolocation by which dolphins navigate and hunt. Underwater explosions cause acoustic trauma, decompression sickness and internal organ damage. To this are added mines, munitions, uncrewed vessels, chemical pollution — including the substances released by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam — and oil products.
The fuel oil. On 15 December 2024, in the area of the Kerch Strait, an accident involving two tankers spilled fuel oil into the sea; estimates of the quantity range from around 2,400 to around 5,000 tonnes. By early January 2025, 61 dead cetaceans had been found in the affected area, of which the Delfa centre attributed 32 to the spill. Around 5,550 birds were rescued.
And most importantly for the present debate: in December 2024 the Scientific Committee of ACCOBAMS — the intergovernmental agreement on the conservation of cetaceans in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean — recommended the development of a post-war recovery plan for Black Sea cetaceans.
Now put this together with the procedural question in the next section. The annexes to the directives and the latest consolidated assessment of conservation status describe the Black Sea as it was before 2022. In the meantime a change has occurred there whose scale is not reflected in any operative legal or reporting instrument.
This is why the question of whether the procedure for adapting the annexes is workable is not a formal one. Under Article 19 of the Habitats Directive, amendments to Annex IV require unanimity in the Council. Under such a mechanism, reflecting a catastrophic change in the status of an entire population in good time is practically impossible.
There is a further question that will only sharpen: the Natura 2000 network is built on spatially fixed sites and static annexes, while species ranges are shifting because of the climate. What is the legal status of a species whose range is just entering a given Member State — or just leaving it? That question remains unresolved.
When this test is being carried out
There is one procedural detail we consider material.
The stress test is being carried out before the publication of the consolidated results of reporting under Articles 12 and 17 for the period 2019–2024. As matters stand, the most recent consolidated report available is the one from 2020, covering 2013–2018.
If conclusions are formulated without taking the new cycle into account, they will rest on data more than eight years old.
And what do the available data say? According to the European Environment Agency report “State of nature in the EU”, 81 % of habitat assessments in the Union are in unfavourable or bad condition, and around 63 % of assessments of species other than birds are in unfavourable conservation status.
That is the context in which this exercise is taking place. It does not support a conclusion that the legal framework is excessively strict.
What we propose and what we do not
Our position contains seventeen specific recommendations. Among them: a time-bound screening phase concluded by an express decision; baseline site data to be a public duty rather than a cost borne by the developer; a fast-track regime for restoration projects; genuine tiering between plan and project level; competence requirements for those preparing assessments; a methodological framework for cumulative effects; alignment of the reporting cycle with that of the water directives; a route for citizen science data to enter official reporting.
What all seventeen have in common is one thing: they can be delivered without opening the text of the directives.
We also say clearly what we do not support: opening the text in order to reduce protection; narrowing the scope of assessment under Article 6(3); broadening the grounds under Article 6(4) without a corresponding strengthening of compensatory measures; curtailing public participation; introducing general or permanent exemptions.
Public participation deserves a separate word, because it is often cited as a cause of delay. In practice the reverse is true: participation exposes deficiencies before consent is granted, rather than afterwards through the courts. Shortening consultation periods does not remove the cost — it moves it from the administrative phase to the judicial one, where it is many times higher. For nobody is that a good bargain.
In closing
We support the stress test. There genuinely is much to simplify, and in Bulgaria it is particularly clear how much of the burden is self-inflicted — through missing data, management plans that have never been adopted, and capacity that does not match the volume of procedures.
But the measure of success for this exercise is, in our view, exactly one: genuinely lighter procedures with conservation status unchanged or improved. If the procedures end up the same and the protection weaker, the test will have failed, whatever the conclusions say.
The Via Pontica Foundation is taking part in the European Commission’s public consultation on initiative No 18072, “Birds and Habitats Directives – stress test”. The full text of our position is available on request.
Sources for the Black Sea data: CEOBS (Conflict and Environment Observatory) — documented mortality for 2022 and the December 2024 recommendation of the ACCOBAMS Scientific Committee; Ecoaction data on recorded cases for 2022–2025; data on the Kerch Strait accident of 15 December 2024 and its consequences for marine mammals and birds.
