Commission proposes lower protection status for Europe’s wolves

The European Commission has proposed to lower the protection status of wolves in Europe based on new data, leading to outrage from environmentalists who accused the Commission president of instrumentalising the issue and questioned its scientific basis.

Wolves are a protected species in Europe, meaning they can only be killed under exceptional circumstances.

However, the Commission has proposed the EU should push to lower the status of wolves under the Bern Convention, an international convention on wildlife conservation in Europe. This would open up the possibility of hunting wolves in the EU.

“The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger, especially for livestock,” Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement published on Wednesday morning.

She added that the Commission’s proposal was a first step towards “more flexibility” for local authorities to “manage critical wolf concentrations more actively.”

According to the Commission, the proposal to change the protection status from “strictly protected” to merely “protected” comes based on new data on wolf populations in the EU that was gathered following a call for submissions from local authorities and other actors launched in September.

More wolves, small impact

The report published alongside the Commission’s proposal, which is based on the consultation, estimates that there are around 20,300 wolves across the EU in 2023 and that, overall, the number of wolves in the EU is increasing.

In terms of wolves’ impact on livestock farming, the report finds that “damage to livestock has increased as wolf populations have grown,” but that the frequency of attacks on livestock decreased significantly in some regions with “adequate preventive measures,” such as some German federal states.

According to the report, wolves kill annually 65,500 heads of livestock, the majority of which are sheep and goats. However, the level of sheep depredation amounts to only 0.065% of the 60 million sheep in the EU.

“On a large scale, the overall impact of wolves on livestock in the EU is very small, but at a local level, the pressure on rural communities can be high in certain areas,” it concludes.

Environmentalists, however, are not convinced by the report as a data basis for the Commission’s proposal.

“This decision of the European Commission is deeply troubling, as it is driven more by political convenience than scientific evidence and stems from an opaque and irregular consultation process relying on anecdotal submissions,” Joanna Swabe, senior director at animal protection NGO Humane Society International/Europe, said in a statement.

September’s call for submissions was not a formal consultation, and many stakeholders and national or regional representatives criticised that the window for submissions was too short.

EU considers reopening wolves high protection status as rural tensions mount

The European Commission has hinted it might review the high protection status of wolves on the back of increasing tension around the predator in rural areas, but the move has been slammed by environmentalists as a political pandering ahead of upcoming elections. 

A political move?

Environmental NGO WWF also pointed to the fact that, in October 2022, the EU still rejected Switzerland’s push to lower wolves’ protected status under the Bern convention, arguing at the time that the wolf had not reached favourable conservation status in most EU member states.

Wednesday’s proposal “does not provide any scientific evidence that the wolf population’s status has changed significantly within a year,” the organisation added in a statement, which accused von der Leyen of sacrificing “conservation successes for her own political gain.”

Meanwhile, Sergiy Moroz, policy manager for biodiversity and water at the European Environmental Bureau, called the move an “early Christmas present” to von der Leyen’s political family, the centre-right EPP.

The Commission president was personally affected by the topic in the past when a wolf killed her pony, Dolly, in Germany in September 2022, but the proposal also comes only a few months ahead of the 2024 EU election, for which von der Leyen’s EPP is hoping for rural votes.

EU agriculture Commissioner Janus Wojciechowski, on the other hand, defended the proposal, saying it was “based on an in-depth analysis of all available scientific and technical data” and reflected the “challenges” faced by “farmers and rural communities.”

“The return of wolves has presented significant challenges in a number of areas, especially for pastoralism, in an already difficult socio-economic context,” he argued.

Next steps

Meanwhile, several legislative steps still need to be taken before the status of wolves in the EU would change in practice.

Firstly, EU member states will now have to decide on the Commission’s proposal to push for a change of status under the Bern Convention. Should they support the move, the EU would still need to convince the other Convention members.

A change in the status of wolves under the Convention is the precondition for such a change in the EU’s own legislation, the Habitats Directive.

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