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Protecting the Nature Restoration Law
The EU Nature Restoration Law (NRL) is central to the European Commission President’s climate crusade, the Green Deal.
EU public affairs
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Public relations
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PR for good causes
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Campaign strategy
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Advocacy & politics
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Strategy
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Key stats
175+
Total pieces of coverage
100m+
Estimated overall reach
Washington Post, Guardian, Euronews, AFP, Politico, EU Observer, TVE, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, Volkskrant, Radio France, Le Soir, Liberation, ZDF
Coverage highlights
The challenge
The EU Nature Restoration Law (NRL) is central to the European Commission President’s climate crusade, the Green Deal.
The ambitious legislation aimed to restore 20% of European land and sea by 2030 with a commitment to restore all degraded areas by 2050.
As the NRL reached the committee vote stage, the European People’s Party (EPP) launched a coordinated and dangerously effective attack on the proposed legislation, arguing that this law would damage food production, raise prices and ruin the livelihoods of farmers, foresters, and fishers.
The EPP’s disinformation threatened to torpedo the bill, setting the EU’s Green Agenda back by years.
There was an urgent need to shift the toxic narrative immediately ahead of the vote.
The solution
89up’s insights told us that the best strategy to win the votes of the EEP (centre right) and ensure support by other wavering parties was to make the business case for the NRL, rather than focussing on the environmental arguments.
The business voice was uniquely suited to build credibility and appeal to policy makers and journalists on the centre right - which our policy insights identified as the target political audience.
89up placed an open letter signed by more than 100 businesses, including multinationals Nestle, Unilever and Coca Cola, across the target markets.
To counter arguments that the NRL would affect food prices, we worked with Michelin starred chefs from across Europe to show how climate change puts iconic dishes from each country at risk, making them unaffordable to most people.
The impact
The law survived. Despite extraordinary levels of opposition from the EPP and the far-right in the European Parliament, key EEP legislators were convinced of the validity of our arguments and rebelled against their party line.
By actively monitoring all engaged journos and ensuring they received briefings on the business case for the NRL, 89up embedded it as a core media narrative, counter-balancing the EPP talking points which had dominated unchallenged until this point.
Extensive media coverage of the business support for the law at committee stage led to mentions of the business support for the law in the debate in the European Parliament at plenary stage, with our messaging repeated verbatim by legislators in the committee stage.
