TERNEUZEN, the Netherlands — Europe’s huge chemicals sector is campaigning to weaken the European Union’s most important climate policy — and Brussels is listening. At a meeting in Antwerp on Wednesday, industry chiefs will attempt to persuade European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and national leaders to water down the Emissions Trading System (ETS), a cap-and-trade strategy to cut greenhouse gas emissions. They come with a well-rehearsed pitch: Their sector, one of the biggest in Europe, is in crisis.  Factories are being squeezed by a perfect storm of high energy prices, intense competition from China, weak demand from downstream industries — and the world’s most expensive carbon pricing scheme. Virtually no other jurisdiction in the world faces carbon costs as high as the EU, they argue: If current plans to strengthen the scheme go ahead, Europe’s chemicals industry could be dead within a decade. “Our competitors abroad don’t face comparable ETS regimes,” Markus Steilemann, CEO of German chemicals producer Covestro, told POLITICO, calling for “an urgent reform of the EU ETS to align climate ambition with competitive reality.” For environmental advocates, however, touching the ETS is akin to sacrilege. The 20-year-old scheme — which puts strict limits on the amount of planet-warming gases industry can emit, and covers nearly half of the bloc’s emission — is the bedrock of EU climate policy, forcing industry to find cleaner energy sources. Industries currently pay around €80 for every ton of carbon they emit, and by 2039 will no longer be allowed to emit any carbon at all.  But the ETS legislation is up for review this year, and momentum is growing for it to be significantly weakened. Several member countries and political groups — including von der Leyen’s own center-right European People’s Party — have signaled they want to see reforms. “Becoming greener cannot be our goal; it means becoming poorer,” Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said on Tuesday, adding he would push for exemptions to the ETS to “ensure that domestic industry remains competitive and that our companies do not relocate.” If the ETS is substantially weakened, it would be the biggest green policy yet to fall victim to the green backlash that has defined the first 14 months of von der Leyen’s second term. ALARMED? YOU SHOULD BE EU chemicals industry body CEFIC — one of the richest lobby groups in Brussels, according to the Corporate Europe Observatory — has long warned that doomsday is near for Europe’s chemicals sector. It has released report after report outlining the loss of market share to China, the closure of plants and plummeting investment. It has even sponsored an advertising campaign in Brussels metro stations that booms out in bold letters: “Alarmed? You should be. Europe is losing production sites, quality jobs and independence.” It ends with a plea to “save our industry.” Industries currently pay around €80 for every ton of carbon they emit. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images That warning is echoed by industry chiefs. Markus Kamieth, CEO of BASF, Europe’s largest chemicals company, told reporters late last year that Europe “has the theoretical potential” to compete with the U.S. and China. “But [in] real life, I think we shoot ourselves in the foot way too often.” The chemicals lobby has come under fire for its outsized influence in Brussels. “CEFIC already maintains almost unparalleled access to EU decision-makers, registering the third-highest number of lobby meetings with the European Commission of all lobby organisations in the EU,” said Raphaël Kergueno, a senior policy officer at NGO Transparency International. Still, the sector has plenty of facts to back up its apocalyptic warnings. Since 2023 more than 20 major chemical sites have shut across Europe, costing some 30,000 jobs, according to trade union IndustriALL, which warns that a further 200,000 jobs in the sector could be lost over the next five years.  Chemical investments in Europe collapsed by more than 80 percent in 2025 from the year before, according to a recent report from CEFIC, while capacity closures continue to outpace new projects — turning Europe into a place to shut plants, not build them. Analysts say China’s rapid expansion into chemicals production is adding pressure. “European producers are especially hit, largely due to high energy costs and a reliance on uncompetitive liquid feedstocks, with the least competitive assets continuing to post negative margins,” said Andrew Neale, global head of chemicals at S&P Global Energy. As a result, he said, “longer-term investment in decarbonization and circularity have been deprioritized.” Dow’s recent investment decisions illustrate this well. The American chemical giant plans to close three plants in Europe and cut 800 jobs, citing the need to exit “higher-cost, energy-intensive assets” as the continent’s competitiveness erodes.  “It’s very clear that Europe currently suffers from a lack of competitiveness,” Julia Schlenz, president of Dow Europe, told POLITICO, warning that carbon costs and regulation are moving faster than the infrastructure needed to decarbonize. As the bad news keeps coming, the sector has increasingly called for the ETS to be weakened. In July last year CEFIC published its demands, including the issuance of free carbon allowances, a longer timeline for phasing out emissions, and the inclusion of carbon removal credits. BASF’s Kamieth, who is also president of CEFIC, repeated those calls this week in an interview with the Financial Times, calling the ETS in its current form “obsolete.” Member countries and the European Parliament have already agreed to consider these proposed changes in the upcoming review of the ETS. Germany’s environment minister, Carsten Schneider, said at an energy summit in January that it was “not the case that what has been set until 2039 can never be revised,” adding that it is possible “to allow further free allocations and to permit certificates beyond 2039 as well.” Some business groups and member countries have gone further, with Italy’s primary industry body Confindustria as well as the Czech and Slovak governments calling for the ETS to be temporarily suspended altogether. “In a deeply changed geopolitical context, the ETS, in its current configuration, has revealed all of its limitations,” Confindustria President Emanuele Orsini said in a statement Tuesday. “The ETS is an unbalanced system that fails to deliver the decarbonisation benefits it claims to pursue, while in practice undermining the competitiveness of European industry.” The European Commission sees the electrification of industry as not just a climate imperative but an energy security one. | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images Defenders of the ETS insist this is the wrong approach. They argue that the emphasis should be on more rapid decarbonization, which for the chemicals sector hinges on electrifying its industrial processes. But that, too, costs money. ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING The chimneys of Terneuzen chemical plant have been billowing out carbon-laden smoke for more than 60 years, as the Dutch factory sucks in an endless stream of natural gas and pumps out plastic products. But in June last year the industrial buzz subsided as Dow, the plant’s operator, shut down one of its three main “steam-cracker” units because it was too expensive to run — in what has become a common story across Europe’s chemicals sector. Steam-cracking is the crux of the chemicals industry’s reliance on energy. It turns oil or gas into the basic building blocks of plastics and chemicals by heating them to almost 1,000 degrees Celsius. The process uses vast amounts of energy because the furnaces are kept at these temperatures 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making it one of the most energy-intensive processes in Europe.  Electrifying steam-crackers would require huge amounts of clean electricity — which the industry insists is simply not yet available. “One thing we know is if we are going to switch to electric cracking, eventually, when the technology is there, is that we need significant amounts of renewable electricity delivered here,” says Dennis Kredler, Dow’s director for EU affairs in Brussels. Terneuzen is not an outlier. Across Europe’s chemical clusters, decarbonization targets are racing ahead of the power grids meant to support them. “If you can’t get renewable electricity off the grid, we said, okay, we need to do it ourselves and find these leading providers to secure wind and solar energy for our sites in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and so on,” LyondellBasell CEO Peter Vanacker told POLITICO. “But we need support from Brussels.” The European Commission sees the electrification of industry as not just a climate imperative but an energy security one. In an interview with POLITICO in December, EU energy chief Dan Jorgensen said the shift would be good for the bloc. “There is not one European country that will not benefit from Europe being more independent on the energy side,” he said. German Greens MEP Jutta Paulus agrees, arguing that Europe’s competitiveness will ultimately depend less on looser rules than on faster access to renewable power and new markets for low-carbon chemicals. “Every chemical industry on this planet will have to transition away from fossil fuels — that’s very clear,” she said. Some right-of-center MEPs also broadly agree. Peter Liese, from the European People’s Party, said the chemicals industry is the reason why the ETS debate is so difficult. “Chemical companies talk about their costs due to the ETS. However, they do not talk about how they intend to decarbonize. The purpose of the ETS is not to torment companies, but to encourage them to decarbonize.” Peter Liese, from the European People’s Party, said the chemicals industry is the reason why the ETS debate is so difficult. | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images However, others in the EPP take a less sympathetic approach, and the group’s overall position has yet to be clarified. Rob Ingram, head of the plastics division at British chemicals giant INEOS, insists the sector is dedicated to decarbonizing — just not as fast as current laws demand. “I’m convinced that all the peers in the industry absolutely know that we need to decarbonize and develop a second economy and want to do that,” Ingram told POLITICO. “The question is, how do we get there?”  He argues that if the EU over-regulates high-emitting sectors, those sectors will just go offshore to countries with weaker or no carbon controls.  “De-industrialization of Europe is actually worse for the planet,” he says. LEAKING CARBON It was this risk — known as “carbon leakage” — that prompted the EU initially to grant free ETS allowances to industries most at risk of moving offshore. But Brussels has now attempted to address that by charging a carbon tax on imports, and is phasing out free allowances.  Chemicals, though, don’t fall under the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, giving extra force to their call for continued free allowances. And they have evidence that the fear of leakage is being realized: While Europe debates how to keep its chemical plants alive, BASF is pressing ahead with its largest investment ever, a €10 billion fully integrated chemicals mega-plant — in China.  Tatiana Santos, head of chemicals policy at the European Environmental Bureau, says the EU’s response should not be to deregulate, arguing the EU’s selling point is precisely its higher environmental standards. “At the end of the day, we cannot compete with China or the U.S. in lower standards.” But that argument doesn’t persuade Peter Huntsman, CEO of chemicals producer Huntsman. “When is it time to step back and ask, are we accomplishing anything?” he asked, dismissing the argument that if you give the ETS time to work its magic, it will eventually force industry to find affordable, competitive, low-carbon means of production. “The chemical industry does not have 10 years left,” he said. Zia Weise and Francesca Micheletti contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — The world is rapidly closing in on the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit that serves as a threshold for ever more dangerous climate change, European scientists have warned.  Average global temperatures are now around 1.4C higher than during the pre-industrial era, according to data released Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus planetary observation service. The scientists also found that 2025 was the third-hottest year on record. If this warming trend continues, temperatures will breach the 1.5C limit set out in the Paris Agreement before the end of this decade. In the 2015 landmark climate accord, governments pledged to limit global warming to “well below” 2C and ideally to 1.5C.  The threats from climate change, such as more intense heat waves and rising sea levels, increase with every tenth of a degree of warming. Scientists also warn that passing 1.5C risks triggering so-called tipping points, from rainforest diebacks to ocean circulation collapse, that bring about irreversible and extreme climatic changes.  In theory, the world could return to 1.5C after crossing it by using technology to remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a scenario known as “overshoot.” This technology, however, is not yet available at the scale required. “With the 1.5C in the terms of the Paris Agreement around the corner, now we are effectively entering a phase where it will be about managing that overshoot,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, told reporters at a press conference. “It’s basically inevitable that we will pass that threshold, and it’s up to us to decide how we want to deal with the enhanced and increased higher risk that we will face as a consequence of this,” he said. The longer and greater the overshoot, the bigger the risk, he added. The hottest year — and the only one so far to exceed the 1.5C threshold — remains 2024 with 1.6C. However, the Paris Agreement targets refer to long-term trends rather than those lasting a few years, and Buontempo said three different Copernicus models, including five-year averages and 30-year linear trends, showed warming has now reached around 1.4C.  Copernicus data shows that 2025 was the third-warmest year on record at 1.47C above pre-industrial levels, just marginally cooler than 2023. That’s despite El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern that tends to bring hotter temperatures on top of the human-induced warming, ending in mid-2024 and a cooling La Niña phase emerging late last year. “The last three years in particular have been extremely warm compared to earlier years,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director at Copernicus. Taken together, she noted, the three-year period exceeded 1.5C, something that had not occurred before.  “The primary reason for these record temperatures is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, dominated by the burning of fossil fuels,” Burgess said. “As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the air, temperatures continue to rise, including in the ocean; sea levels continue to rise, and glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets continue to melt.”  For the European continent, 2025 also marked the third-warmest year on record, the data shows. Hot and windy conditions contributed to record wildfires, resulting in Europe’s worst fire-related emissions since monitoring began 23 years ago. Half the world experienced an above-average number of days causing strong heat stress, meaning temperatures that feel like 32C or more. Burgess added that some regions — including most of Australia, parts of Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula — saw more days with extreme heat stress, when perceived temperatures reach dangerous levels above 46C. “The summers we are facing now are very different to the summers that our parents experienced, very different to the summers that our grandparents experienced,” Burgess said. “Children today will be exposed to more heat hazards and more climate hazards than perhaps we were or our parents were.” The polar regions saw significantly higher temperatures in 2025, with the Antarctic experiencing its hottest year and the Arctic its second-warmest year on record.  Accordingly, the expanse of polar sea ice was below average throughout the year, and in February 2025 briefly hit a record low since monitoring began in the 1970s. The shrinking of the ice caps accelerates global warming by reducing the amount of sunlight reflected back into space.  European science officials also expressed concern about the Trump administration’s climate science cuts and erasure of datasets.  “Data and observations are obviously central to our efforts to confront climate change … and these challenges don’t know any borders,” said Florian Pappenberger, director of the European Centre For Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus. “Therefore, it is of course concerning that we have an issue in terms of data.”  Hanne Cokelaere contributed to this report.

In February 2022, as Russia marched on Kyiv, Oleksandr Dmitriev realized he knew how to stop Moscow’s men: Blow a hole in the dam that strangled the Irpin River northeast of the capital and restore the long-lost boggy floodplain. A defense consultant who organized offroad races in the area before the war, Dmitriev was familiar with the terrain. He knew exactly what reflooding the river basin — a vast expanse of bogs and marshes that was drained in Soviet times — would do to Russia’s war machinery.  “It turns into an impassable turd, as the jeep guys say,” he said. He told the commander in charge of Kyiv’s defense as much, and was given the go-ahead to blow up the dam.  Dmitriev’s idea worked. “In principle, it stopped the Russian attack from the north,” he said. The images of Moscow’s tanks mired in mud went around the world.  Three years later, this act of desperation is inspiring countries along NATO’s eastern flank to look into restoring their own bogs — fusing two European priorities that increasingly compete for attention and funding: defense and climate.  That’s because the idea isn’t only to prepare for a potential Russian attack. The European Union’s efforts to fight global warming rely in part on nature’s help, and peat-rich bogs capture planet-warming carbon dioxide just as well as they sink enemy tanks.  Yet half of the EU’s bogs are being sapped of their water to create land suitable for planting crops. The desiccated peatlands in turn release greenhouse gases and allow heavy vehicles to cross with ease.  Some European governments are now wondering if reviving ailing bogs can solve several problems at once. Finland and Poland told POLITICO they were actively exploring bog restoration as a multi-purpose measure to defend their borders and fight climate change.  Poland’s massive 10 billion złoty (€2.3 billion) Eastern Shield border fortification project, launched last year, “provides for environmental protection, including by … peatland formation and forestation of border areas,” the country’s defense ministry said in a statement.  “It’s a win-win situation that achieves many targets at the same time,” said Tarja Haaranen, director general for nature at Finland’s environment ministry.  BOGS! WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?  In their pristine state, bogs are carpeted with delicate mosses that can’t fully decompose in their waterlogged habitats and slowly turn into soft, carbon-rich soil known as peat.  This is what makes them Earth’s most effective repositories of CO2. Although they cover only 3 percent of the planet, they lock away a third of the world’s carbon — twice the amount stored in forests.  Yet when drained, bogs start releasing the carbon they stored for hundreds or thousands of years, fueling global warming.  Some 12 percent of peatlands worldwide are degraded, producing 4 percent of planet-warming pollution. (To compare, global aviation is responsible for around 2.5 percent.) In Europe, where bogs were long regarded as unproductive terrain to be converted into farmland, the picture is especially dramatic: Half of the EU’s peatlands are degraded, mostly due to drainage for agricultural purposes. As a result, EU countries reported 124 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution from drained peatlands in 2022, close to the annual emissions of the Netherlands. Some scientists say even this is an underestimate.  Various peatland restoration projects are now underway, with bog repair having gained momentum under the EU’s new Nature Restoration Law, which requires countries to revive 30 percent of degraded peatlands by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050.  The bloc’s 27 governments now have until September 2026 to draft plans on how they intend to meet these targets.  On NATO’s eastern flank, restoring bogs would be a relatively cheap and straightforward measure to achieve EU nature targets and defense goals all at once, scientists argue.  “It’s definitely doable,” said Aveliina Helm, professor of restoration ecology at the University of Tartu, who until recently advised Estonia’s government on its EU nature repair strategy. “We are right now in the development of our national restoration plan, as many EU countries are,” she added, “and as part of that I see great potential to join those two objectives.”  NATO’S BOG BELT  As it happens, most of the EU’s peatlands are concentrated on NATO’s border with Russia and Kremlin-allied Belarus — stretching from the Finnish Arctic through the Baltic states, past Lithuania’s hard-to-defend Suwałki Gap and into eastern Poland.  When waterlogged, this terrain represents a dangerous trap for military trucks and tanks. In a tragic example earlier this year, four U.S. soldiers stationed in Lithuania died when they drove their 63-ton M88 Hercules armored vehicle into a bog.  And when armies can’t cross soggy open land, they are forced into areas that are more easily defended, as Russia found out when Dmitriev and his soldiers blew up the dam north of Kyiv in February 2022.  A destroyed Russian tank sits in a field on April 28, 2022 in Moshchun, Ukraine. | Taras Podolian/Gazeta.ua/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images “The Russians there in armored personnel carriers got stuck at the entrance, then they were killed with a Javelin [anti-tank missile], then when the Russians tried to build pontoons … ours shot them with artillery,” Dmitriev recounted.  Bog-based defense isn’t a new idea. Waterlogged terrain has stopped troops throughout European history — from Germanic tribes inflicting defeat on Roman legions by trapping them beside a bog in 9 AD, to Finland’s borderlands ensnaring the Soviets in the 1940s. The treacherous marshes north of Kyiv posed a formidable challenge to armies in both world wars.  Strategically rewetting drained peatlands to prepare for an enemy attack, however, would be a novelty. But it’s an idea that’s starting to catch on — among environmentalists, defense strategists and politicians.  Pauli Aalto-Setälä, a lawmaker with Finland’s governing National Coalition Party, last year filed a parliamentary motion calling on the Finnish government to restore peatlands to secure its borders and fight climate change.  “In Finland, we have used our nature from a defense angle in history,” said Aalto-Setälä, who holds the rank of major and trained as a tank officer during his national service. “I realized that at the eastern border especially, there are a lot of excellent areas to restore — for the climate, but also to make it as difficult to go through as possible.”  The Finnish defense and environment ministries will now start talks in the fall on whether to launch a bog-repair pilot project, according to Haaranen, who will lead the working group. “I’m personally very excited about this.” POLAND’S PEATY POLITICS Discussions on defensive nature restoration are advancing fastest in Poland — even though Warsaw is usually reluctant to scale up climate action.  Climate activists and scientists started campaigning for nature-based defense a few years ago when they realized that Poland’s politicians were far more likely to spend financial and political capital on environmental efforts when they were linked to national security.  “Once you talk about security, everyone listens right now in Poland,” said Wiktoria Jędroszkowiak, a Polish activist who helped initiate the country’s Fridays for Future climate protests. “And our peatlands and ancient forests, they are the places that are going to be very important for our defense once the war gets to Poland as well.”  After years of campaigning, the issue has now reached government level in Warsaw, with discussions underway between scientists and Poland’s defense and environment ministries.  Wiktor Kotowski, an ecologist and member of the Polish government’s advisory council for nature conservation, said initial talks with the defense ministry have been promising.  “There were a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions but in general we found there are only synergies,” he said. Damaged Russian vehicle marked V by Russian troops and then re-marked UA by Ukrainians bogged down in the mud on April 8, 2022 in Moshchun, Ukraine. | Serhii Mykhalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images “What the ministry of defense wants is to get back as many wetlands as possible along the eastern border,” Kotowski added. “And that is what is required from the point of view of nature restoration and climate as well.”  Cezary Tomczyk, a state secretary at Poland’s defense ministry, agreed. “Our objectives align,” he said. “For us, nature is an ally, and we want to use it.”  JUST … DON’T DRAIN THE SWAMP  Governments in the Baltics have shown little interest so far. Only Lithuania’s environment ministry said that defense-linked wetland restoration “is currently under discussion,” declining to offer further details.  Estonia’s defense ministry and Latvia’s armed forces said that new Baltic Defence Line plans to fortify the three countries’ borders would make use of natural obstacles including bogs, but did not involve peatland restoration.  Yet scientists see plenty of potential, given that peatlands cover 10 percent of the Baltics. And in many cases, the work would be straightforward, said Helm, the Estonian ecologist.  “We have a lot of wetlands that are drained but still there. If we now restore the water regime — we close the ditches that constantly drain them and make them emit carbon — then they are relatively easy to return to a more natural state,” she said.  Healthy peatlands serve as havens for wildlife: Frogs, snails, dragonflies and specialized plant species thrive in the austere conditions of bogs, while rare birds stop by to nest. They also act as barriers to droughts and wildfires, boosting Europe’s resilience to climate change.  The return of this flora and fauna takes time. But ending drainage not only puts a fast stop to pollution — it also instantly renders the terrain impassable. As long as the land isn’t completely drained, “it’s one or two years and you have the wetland full of water,” said Kotowski, the Polish ecologist. “Restoration is a difficult process from an ecological point of view, but for water retention, for stopping emissions and for difficulty to cross — so for defensive purposes — it’s pretty straightforward and fast.”  And at a time when Europe’s focus has shifted to security, with defense budgets surging and in some cases diverting money from the green transition, environmentalists hope that military involvement could unlock unprecedented funding and speed up nature restoration.  “At the moment, it takes five years to obtain approval for peatland rewetting, and sometimes it can take 10 years,” said Franziska Tanneberger, director of Germany’s Greifswald Mire Centre, a leading European peatlands research institute. “When it comes to military activities, there is a certain prioritization. You can’t wait 10 years if we need it for defense.”  THE TRACTOR FACTOR  But that doesn’t mean there’s no resistance to the idea.  A Russian tank seized inside of the woodland is examined by Ukrainian soldiers in Irpin, Ukraine on April 01, 2022. | Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images In Estonia, the environment ministry halted one peatland restoration effort earlier this year amid fierce opposition from locals who worried that rewetting would lead to flooding and forest destruction. Scientists described such concerns as unfounded.  The biggest threat to peatlands is agriculture — an awkward reality for EU governments desperate to avoid drawing the ire of farmers.  In both Finland and Poland, any initial defensive restoration projects are likely to focus on state-owned land, sidestepping this conflict for now. But scientists argue that if countries are serious about large-scale bog repair, they have to talk to farmers. “This will not work without involving agricultural lands,” said Kotowski, the Polish ecologist. A whopping 85 percent of the country’s peatlands are degraded, in most cases because they have been drained to plant crops where water once pooled.  “What we badly need is a program for farmers, to compensate them for rewetting these drained peatlands — and not only compensate, to let them earn money from it,” he added.   There are plants that can be harvested from restored peatlands, such as reeds for use in construction or packaging. Yet for now, the market for such crops in Europe is too small to incentivize farmers to switch.  The bogs-for-defense argument also doesn’t work for all countries. In Germany, where more than 90 percent of peatlands are drained, the Bundeswehr sounded reluctant when asked about the idea.  “The rewetting of wetlands can be both advantageous and disadvantageous for [NATO’s] own operations,” depending on the individual country, a spokesperson for the Bundeswehr’s infrastructure and environment office said.  NATO troops would need to move through Germany in the event of a Russian attack in the east, and bogs restrict military movements. Still, “the idea of increasing the obstacle value of terrain by causing flooding and swamping … has been used in warfare for a very long time and is still a viable option today,” the spokesperson said.  BOGGING DOWN PUTIN Scientists are quick to acknowledge that a bogs-for-security approach can’t solve everything.  “Of course we still need traditional defense. This isn’t meant to replace that,” said Tanneberger, who also advises a company that recently drew up a detailed proposal for defense-linked peatland restoration.  Bogs can’t stop drones or shoot down missiles, and war isn’t good for nature — or conservation efforts.  Soldiers of the “Bratstvo” (Brotherhood) battalion under the command of the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine sit on the muzzle of a captured Russian tank stuck in a field on April 2, 2022 in Nova Basan Village, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine. | Andrii Kotliarchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images And in Ukraine, the flooding of the Irpin basin was economically and ecologically destructive.  Among outside observers, there was initial excitement about the prospect of a new natural paradise. But villagers in the region lost their lands and homes, and the influx of water had a negative effect on local species that had no time to adapt to the sudden change.  “Yes, it stopped the invasion of Kyiv, and this was badly needed, so no criticism here. But it did result in environmental damage,” said Helm, the Estonian ecologist.  Unlike Ukraine, EU governments have the chance to restore peatlands with care, taking into account the needs of nature, farmers and armies.  “Perhaps it’s better to think ahead instead of being forced to act in a hurry,” she said. “We have this opportunity. Ukraine didn’t.”  Zia Weise reported from Brussels, Wojciech Kość from Warsaw and Veronika Melkozerova from Kyiv.