The election campaign is in full swing ahead of the Danish parliamentary elections on 24 March. Unfortunately, the current government did not fulfil its promises regarding a new biodiversity law. Despite promises in both the government platform and the Green Tripartite agreement, the law has not been realised.

Now it will be up to a new parliament to work to ensure that the biodiversity law will finally be passed. ☘️

One of the major challenges with the law? Defining when a natural area is sufficiently protected. When can we call it protected nature – and when is it just empty words?

IUCN has a clear answer to this question: IUCN has developed a global standard for protected nature that Denmark can use free of charge. We write about this in today’s edition of Altinget Miljø (in Danish!).

IUCN global standard for protected nature

The standard includes both a definition of what protected nature is and a detailed guide that describes a number of set criteria that a specific nature area must fulfil in order to be designated as protected.

As early as 2018, the Danish Ministry of the Environment was criticised for reporting protected areas to the EU and UN, which in practice did not meet international requirements for protected nature, but included for example parks and burial mounds.

Subsequently, a project group under the Danish IUCN National Committee carried out a systematic assessment of Danish conservation areas (“fredninger” in Danish) according to the IUCN global standard.

The assessment showed that 378 of the 1720 protected areas analysed met the standard and these have since been reported by the Danish authorities as protected nature to the EU and UN databases.

In 2024, a further update of the reported protected areas was carried out by assessing 30 newer protected areas.

In 2022, we assessed five of Denmark’s planned nature national parks, all of which met the criteria for protected areas. The nature national parks Fussingø, Gribskov and Almindingen were assigned category ‘II National Park’, while Tranum and Stråsø were assigned category ‘V Protected Landscape’.

The use of the categories provided an opportunity to assess whether the objectives of the nature national parks lived up to being strictly protected, which three of them did.

We recommend that the IUCN standard for protected areas be included in the work on the upcoming Danish law on biodiversity.

This will help to ensure that the law is a credible and technically sound tool for nature conservation and protection with definitions and objectives that are widely recognised internationally.

Read the full post in Altinget Miljø (in Danish).