What is the NaturePact?

Together with 57 other communes, the commune of Niederanven signed a commitment to the state in 2021 to pursue a municipal policy in the interest of nature and the environment. The Nature Pact was officially signed in the Council of Aldermen on 10 November 2021.

With the signature, the commune confirms its previous objectives in the areas of sustainable protection of natural resources, especially in the areas of nature around settlements, in open spaces, in forests and in water, as well as to achieve and, if possible, to exceed the targets set out in Luxembourg's integrated national energy and climate plan for the period 2021-2030 "PNEC", the national plan for sustainable development and the strategy and action plan for adaptation to climate change.

In return, the state supports the municipalities financially and technically in the implementation process. Thus, the Nature Pact enables the state to support the communes environmental efforts to reduce the loss of biodiversity.

In order to confirm the success of the local climate strategy, the planning and implementation of concrete measures in this regard is indispensable.

To begin with, the commune should set itself objectives - in writing - for its future environmental policy actions. These should be in conformity with the national guidelines and also cover all nature-relevant topics as far as possible. In order to ensure this, the communal action is primarily oriented towards the action points defined in the Nature Pact.

Among other things, these stipulate that a "communal strategy for nature conservation" be drawn up at the beginning of the work, which defines quantitative and qualitative objectives for environmental policy work. This should be based on the catalogue of measures, which contains a total of 77 criteria in the six thematic fields of "nature conservation in general", "settlement area", "open land", "forest", "water" and "communication and cooperation". By working through the catalogue, the work done so far by the participating communes is reviewed and evaluated in an audit. Future measures should also refer to this catalogue of criteria.