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Glossary item | Last updated: 10 Jan 2025

Carbon-rich ecosystems

The EU’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 aims to step up efforts to increase organic carbon stored in soils by increasing the application of sustainable soil management practices and protecting carbon-rich ecosystems, while the EU's Farm to Fork Strategy demands that farming practices that remove carbon from the atmosphere and contribute to achieving climate neutrality would be better rewarded. In this policy context, a loss of soil organic carbon is considered as environmental degradation.

Source: EUROSTAT


The Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the new Adaptation Strategy put a strong emphasis on carbon-rich ecosystems, areas most vulnerable to climate change, and the need to enhance resilience. Both strategies highlight the implementation of nature-based solutions on a larger scale as a way to increase climate resilience and contribute to multiple Green Deal objectives, including mitigation and carbon sequestration. For example, protecting and restoring carbon-rich ecosystems such as forest, grasslands, wetlands and peatlands; promoting sustainable management of land, including agroecology, agroforestry and sustainable forest management; and improving soil health, will help to mitigate and adapt to climate change while reversing biodiversity loss in a cost-effective way.
The 2030 goals of this legally binding instrument are to restore significant areas of degraded and carbon-rich ecosystems; to prevent any deterioration in conservation trends and status of habitats and species; to ensure that at least 30% of them reach favourable conservation status or at least show a positive trend; and to increase the EU’s resilience, and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation and disaster risk reduction as a key nature-based solution.

Source: EURO-Lex