The European Council has done the world a substantial service by approving a law to restore the continent’s damaged ecosystems.

Why the world? Because the EU’s new Nature Restoration Law sets an example other nations should follow. In degrading nature, we have degraded ourselves – our health, the quality of our lives, and the connections with our roots.

Besides, healthy ecosystems provide civilization with vital services at no cost. Failing to restore those services would be like leaving a trillion-dollar gift unopened.

Actually, the gift is worth much more. Ten years ago, researchers led by environmental economist Robert Costanza estimated that just 17 key ecosystems provided civilization with services worth $145 trillion annually. Unfortunately, nations sacrificed as much as $20 trillion in services by degrading lands with deforestation, urbanization, and agriculture.

The damage has been extensive in Europe, where more than 80 percent of habitats are in poor condition and one in three pollinators are in decline. The new law sets legally binding goals for member countries to restore at least 20 percent of their land and sea areas by the end of this decade, and all damaged ecosystems by 2050.

In the process, the European Union will reap a wide variety of benefits. They will include nature’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and make human settlements more resilient to global climate change. For example, wetlands and reforested watersheds will reduce floods as well as absorb CO2, recharge groundwater, and provide wildlife habitat.

In cities, permeable surfaces and green spaces reduce the cost of stormwater controls by absorbing rain where it falls. Urban forestry lowers inner-city temperatures, conserves energy, and saves lives during heat waves. Flowering plants that beautify cities attract and nourish the pollinating insects on which agriculture depends.

Barcelona, Edinburgh, Verona, and Vitoria-Gasteiz already are members of a growing Biophilic Cities Network, based on the work of the late scientist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, who advocated closer contact between people and nature. Studies show such contact reduces stress, which emphases nature’s reintroduction to add beauty and services while giving residents closer contact with nature. Studies show that contacts improves mood, reduces stress, and is good for overall health.

The economic benefits can also be substantial. Researchers in the United States found in 2015 that ecosystem-service restoration had created 221,000 jobs and $24.5 billion in economic benefits, along with $1 billion in local and $2 billion in national tax revenues. The World Resources Institute calculates that every Euro invested in restoring degraded lands returns 30 Euros in economic benefits.

Writing in Meer last fall, I proposed that all nations join a decades-long campaign to restore the natural systems we’ve degraded and destroyed, often thinking that technology could do a better job. The philosophy of controlling floods rather than avoiding them has been a prime example. To accommodate people with the poor sense to build their homes in the paths of rivers, then built countless dams, levees, and other modifications to keep rivers out. The simpler solution was to keep people out of floodplains so rivers could do their jobs by using their meanders, wetlands, and floodplains to spread out, slow down, and control their destructive force. People could build beyond their reach.

Instead, our legacy is an estimated 1.2 million dams in 36 European countries, half of them abandoned, many past their useful life, and virtually none built to handle the precipitation events we see today because of climate change.

In 2020, the European Environment Agency reported that human-made flood barriers have degraded up to 90 percent of floodplains. Euronews reports that more than 10,000 structures built to control rivers already have been removed in the U.S. and Europe to restore the health of riverine ecosystems.

Europe’s new Nature Restoration Law is the latest development in a growing movement to recognize that nature and species have their own inherent rights, including the right to life. As of 2020, 39 countries had established nature’s rights in their constitutions, treaties, court decisions, and laws.

“They represent a new wave of nature and animal rights movements gaining traction,” the Guardian reports, “amid frustration over humanity’s ultra-exploitative relationship with other species and growing concern about the shortcomings of the technology-and-markets approach to the climate crisis.”

Even as we develop artificial intelligence and the means to settle Mars, we must maintain our close connection with the natural world on Earth. It nourishes our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. And as David Attenborough warns, “What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.”