The Re-Examination of the 2015 REFIT Fitness Check of the Nature Directives

This chapter will ask if the Habitats Directive’s rules on designation, in their status quo, contribute to the current detrimental state of European biodiversity. To that end, it will introduce the Commission’s instrument for evaluating legislative tools, the Fitness Checks. It will present how the 2015 Fitness Check of the Nature Directives was set up, what assessment elements it contained and what questions it covered. It will also re-examine the Commission’s methodology in setting up the Fitness Check and will find that detailed questions on the Member States’ experiences with their Natura 2000 designation duties under the Habitats Directive were missing. All replies to the issued Evidence Gathering Questionnaires will be re-examined in this chapter, focusing on the various stakeholders’ information concerning their experiences with designating Natura 2000. Subsequently, this chapter will categorise these replies into legal reasons for the non-optimal compliance levels and reasons that are rooted elsewhere than in the drafting of the Habitats Directive to explore in more depth the individual roots of the problem of lacking compliance with the Habitats Directive’s designation rules in the Member States.