The Floor Is Not the Ceiling! LULUCF, the ICJ Climate Advisory Opinion, and Repairing the Biosphere
written by Alexandre Chao Viso (WYCJ European Front Campaigner) in collaboration with Hedda Werres (Sylvester Rewilding Co-founder)
A Target Under Pressure
The year 2026 finds global climate policy caught between abstract commitments and physical reality. That is what is happening right now with the EU's Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) target; the rulebook that governs how much carbon Europe's forests, soils, and farmland must absorb. Essentially, it is Europe's "land sink" sector. But under current frameworks, this target functions as a mere bureaucratic accounting ledger.
As the EU currently battles blazes now classified as "sixth-generation" fires (beyond the threshold of direct human suppression) the physical reality is outrunning whatever for profit/growth predictions.
The European Commission prepares its post-2030 climate package, but several Member States and agribusiness and forestry lobbies are pushing to weaken, delay, or dilute the LULUCF target rather than strengthen it for 2040. It is an extraction matrix built for a global growth machine that recognises no ecological ceiling and acknowledges no limits.
A legal briefing commissioned by WWF and published at the end of June 2026 concludes that doing so would not just be bad climate policy: it could put the European Union in breach of international law. To truly repair the biosphere, the floor cannot become the ceiling.
When Rolling Back Becomes an Internationally Wrongful Act
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice found, unanimously, that States' climate obligations do not rest on the Paris Agreement alone: they also flow from customary international law, human rights law, general international environmental law, and the law of the sea.
Two findings matter most for this piece:
Paragraph 427 establishes that a State's failure to act with due diligence to protect the climate system (including backsliding on existing protections) can itself constitute an internationally wrongful act under the law of State responsibility.
Paragraphs 445–454 establish that a breach of these obligations triggers the ordinary consequences of State responsibility: cessation of the wrongful conduct, guarantees of non-repetition, and full reparation for the harm caused.
Put simply: States don't just have a general duty to "do something" about climate change. They have a duty not to weaken what protections already exist, and if they cause harm regardless, they owe more than an apology: they owe full reparation.
The Right the Whole Argument Rests On
There is a third finding that gives this entire argument its weight. Alongside Paragraph 427 on wrongful acts, the Court held at Paragraphs 389 and 393 that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a precondition for the effective enjoyment of a wide range of human rights: life, health, food, water, housing... Because that is so, the right to such an environment is, in the Court's words, inherent in and essential for the enjoyment of those other rights.
The Court stopped short of declaring this right fully settled customary international law in its own name, a caution that reflects genuine disagreement among States about its precise status. But it firmly placed the right inside the body of law that gives content to States' climate obligations, building on the UN General Assembly's own 2022 recognition of the right and on regional courts that had already gone further.
This is why LULUCF is not really a story about tonnes of carbon at all. Healthy soil, water, and ecosystems aren't a co-benefit of good climate policy: they are the substance of what the right to a healthy environment is meant to protect. A degraded land sink is not just an accounting failure; it is, on the Court's own logic, a direct violation of human rights. Not in the abstract, but in the water someone can no longer drink, the harvest someone can no longer grow, the home ravaged by wildfire.
From The Hague to New York: The UNGA Resolution
The advisory opinion is not a binding judgment between States, but it did not stay confined to the pages of a court filing. On 20 May 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution A/80/L.65, welcoming and operationalising the Court's findings by a recorded vote of 141 in favour, 8 against, and 28 abstentions.
The resolution calls on States to comply with the obligations the Court clarified, to act with due diligence and in good faith, and it keeps the advisory opinion on the Assembly's agenda going forward, turning a legal opinion into an ongoing multilateral accountability process. 26 EU Member States supported it, and only Hungary abstained.
This near-unanimous support backs Brussels into a legal corner. A European front that voted to operationalise the advisory opinion at the UNGA cannot return home to Brussels and quietly weaken its own internal climate architecture.
The EU's LULUCF Test
This is precisely the test the EU is now facing with LULUCF:
2018-2023: The LULUCF Regulation (EU 2018/841), revised under the Fit for 55 package, set a binding EU-wide target of 310 million tonnes of net removals per year by 2030, distributed across Member States based on their 2016-2018 baselines.
2024-2026: The EU agreed a headline 2040 target of a 90% net emissions reduction against 1990 levels. Technical proposals under discussion for the post-2030 framework have floated a LULUCF removal target of around 289 Mt CO2e for 2040 but the formal framework adopted left the specific land-sink breakdown open for the post-2030 legislative revision.
Late 2026: The Commission is expected to table its concrete legislative proposal for the post-2030 framework. This is the exact window in which Member States and industry actors are pressing to weaken the sink target rather than raise it.
The stakes are not theoretical. The EU's current land sink is already badly off track: net removals stood at just 198 Mt CO2e in 2023 and an estimated 212 Mt CO2e in 2024 (nowhere near the 310 Mt target for 2030). Europe's land sink has itself been shrinking over the past decade: intensive forestry, peatland drainage, wildfires, and soil degradation have pushed land in countries such as Finland, Latvia, and Estonia from net absorbers of carbon toward net emitters.
Against that backdrop, WWF's June 2026 legal briefing warns that rolling back the LULUCF target, or failing to raise it for 2040, would be inconsistent with the advisory opinion's due diligence findings and could expose the EU to legal challenge.
The Extractivist Logic Inside the Ledger
It's worth asking why a target this important keeps ending up on the chopping block. Part of the answer is technical, but underneath sits a much older issue: a worldview that positions nature as a resource to be managed for output, rather than a web of relationships we belong to.
Standard LULUCF accounting is a fairly pure expression of that extractivist logic. A fast-growing, fire-prone monoculture, planted purely for short-cycle harvest, can be booked as a carbon-sink success the moment it's in the ground. Regardless of what happens to hydrology, biodiversity, or long-term resilience. The ledger only asks whether a number went up. It doesn't ask whether the web of relationships that produced the number can hold itself together. It is a framework designed to substitute cold calculations for active relationship, allowing executives to underprice the future to subsidise the present.
This is where nature restoration stops being a land-management technique and becomes a legal act in its own right. Naming a State's international obligation in a courtroom means little if the land itself stays degraded. Where international legal instruments name what the living world is owed, rewilding physically enacts it: a direct, on-the-ground recognition that damaged territory has an inherent right to recover.
Toward a LULUCF for the Biosphere
If the advisory opinion's logic is taken seriously, the fix isn't just a bigger number. It's a different unit of analysis entirely.
Ecosystems don't organise themselves along national borders or five-year policy cycles. They organise themselves as bioregions: watersheds, forest systems, soil communities that function as one interdependent whole, held together by relationships rather than administrative lines.
Current LULUCF is a ledger built for humans to reassure an accounting system that an emissions target is on track. What the advisory opinion's findings point toward is a LULUCF for the biosphere, where the measure of success isn't just tonnes booked against a national quota, but the restored health and capacity of a bioregion to keep regenerating itself long after any policy cycle has ended.
A Spectrum of Repair
It's tempting, once you see the problem this way, to reach for a single practice and call it "the answer". Getting this precise matters, because overclaiming gives extractive interests an easy excuse to dismiss ecological restoration altogether:
Permaculture is best understood as a design philosophy, a way of arranging human food and land systems to mimic healthy ecosystems. It is valuable at household or community scales, but it isn't a measured climate pathway on its own.
Regenerative Agriculture (cover cropping, reduced tillage, rotational grazing) genuinely rebuilds soil life, but its long-term carbon gains are modest, slow to accrue, and easily reversed if practices lapse. It is a meaningfully better way to farm, but not a standalone solution for a degraded biosphere.
Agroforestry (integrating trees into cropland and pasture) punches far above its weight. Its global mitigation potential is comparable to reforestation because it can be deployed across the enormous footprint of farmed land. It restores real structure, shade, and habitat corridors inside landscapes that still have to feed people.
Rewilding is different from all three. Where reforestation is a technique (planting trees toward a canopy target), rewilding is a goal: the restoration of natural ecological processes (trophic complexity, natural disturbance, dispersal, self-regulation) so that a landscape can run itself again.
Rewilding doesn't just restore a stock of biomass; it restores the web of relationships between species, soil, water, and climate. Where land has been degraded past the point that better farming can heal, full ecological restoration is the clearest match for what the advisory opinion describes as "full reparation". This standard turns what was once viewed by States as a charitable conservation gesture into a binding, non-negotiable legal and ecological debt.
A Living Precedent: Montes Veciñais en Man Común
The EU does not need to reinvent the wheel to figure out what a "bioregional LULUCF" could look like. A working model already exists in Galicia, tracing back millenia.
In Galicia, the Montes Veciñais en Man Común (communal woodlands owned collectively by neighboring communities) cover close to a third of the region's forest land. Under Galician civil law, these lands are permanently inalienable, indivisible, imprescriptible, and unseizable. They cannot be bought by corporations or traded away on a carbon spreadsheet.
For decades, State policies and business interests pushed intensive eucalyptus monocultures onto the surrounding landscapes to satisfy commercial ledger targets. This practice depleted the soil, dried up water tables, and left communities vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires.
These Montes (and generally the Commons) matter because they prove that collective, non-State stewardship isn't a utopian theory. It’s an incredibly resilient, multi-generational reality showing that land can meet ecological baselines precisely because it is shielded from the extractive pressures of the market.
The Modern Blueprint: Sylvester Rewilding
But models like the Man Común face a constant, grinding friction. They exist inside a society hardwired for infinite growth, pushing us to view a forest as a factory and our relationship with it as a transaction. To make collective stewardship the future, we have to look past the spreadsheets and recognise the intrinsic value of a life woven into nature.
For a lot of young people right now, watching climate policy feel less like saving the world and more like watching bureaucrats adjust accounting ledgers while the planet burns leaves a heavy, suffocating kind of paralysis. We live in a culture that hyper-connects us digitally but profoundly isolates us from the living world, conditioning us to think we are totally separate from nature—either just consumers or polluters, but never actually an active part of the ecosystem itself.
This is exactly where youth-led initiatives such as Sylvester Rewilding come in. Instead of waiting around for institutions to hand down the perfect post-2030 legislation, it is a practical attempt to take the future directly into ground-up hands. By pooling collective resources (including with novel digital tools such as their WildTokens) to buy up these degraded land plots, they give young people a physical place to channel that climate anxiety into direct long-lasting action, breaking down the artificial wall between humankind and Nature.
To see how this plays out when legal theory meets real mud, we turn to Hedda Werres, co-founder of Sylvester Rewilding.
The European Commission is drafting its post-2030 package based on abstract ledgers, but Spain and France are already fighting unsuppressible sixth-generation fires. Having just rooted out your first industrial eucalyptus plot in 2025, how wide is the gap between Brussels' desk data and the physical vulnerability you see on the ground as a rewilder?
To be honest I am not sure if the data on the desks of these people in Brussels is so far of from reality, at this point everyone can see how dire the situation is, how big the damage is in all regions of the world and if these people not flat out invent some numbers they will show that we are in massive trouble. What is happening in Brussels and at almost every nation's high level decision making bodies just shows us that these people have accepted that a large part of the population will just suffer and they are gambling that it just wont hit them or at least not so hard as the rest of us.
For everyone working in nature restoration and living in the zones most affected it is frustrating to see how decision makers are just moving around numbers when what we need is a fundamental change in the system. It is just ridiculous to think that we can tackle the problem we have with the same systems and mechanisms we created them with. If we really want to have a chance and reach those goals we set ourselves we need to be brave and do things radically differently. And you already see people on the ground doing this.
The Montes en Man Comun are a good example with the brigadas deseucaliptizadoras (antieucalyptus brigades) communities helping each other to build alternatives, to establish a different relation and vision to their surroundings and to implement it without waiting for high level decision makers to move. Everyone on the ground knows that it's more than urgent, that we don't have time to wait for people that still think they can stick to a system that created all this mess and just find different coping mechanisms.
So yeah I think the gap between the data and the reality on the ground might not be that big but the level of damage that people are willing to accept is massive and the room to gamble is way smaller if you are on the ground rather than far away like the people in Brussels.This piece draws a line between standard reforestation (just planting trees) and rewilding (restoring processes and relationships). Funding frameworks and carbon markets obviously love tree-planting because it’s easy to count on a spreadsheet, but how does Sylvester navigate this systemic friction?
The level of complexity nature and life in general has is a big problem for the system we are currently operating on. If you want a functioning ecosystem you will have to look at so many different aspects so putting this into a straight forward action = output type of system is basically impossible. At the moment that means for us and many other organisations working in the field that we have to be very creative.
We need to make use of the support and funding available to us that acknowledges this complexity and enables us to do our work rather than trying to force us into a box. Unfortunately this also means funding is very limited and things like carbon markets are pretty inaccessible from the start.
Focusing locally seems to be our option at the moment. What is needed on the ground, what resources and options are available specifically in that area and how can we get communities and people on board. Of course there has to be a change on the high level but maybe it has to come from the ground and not from the top down.Using digital tools like WildTokens lets a young, ground-up movement collectively finance land without corporate backing. How do you make sure that digital momentum doesn't just become another abstract ledger, and instead keeps people firmly anchored to the real, physical soil?
We are experimenting with different things at the moment. The WildTokens for example have different functions. They can be used to raise funding needed for a project and help to communicate the development of the project in a very transparent way. At the moment we are trying to report back to the community what is happening on the ground as raw as possible and we aim to collect data not just for the sake of collecting data but to show people what is going on the ground.
Because we are so small and we are not even eligible for anything like a carbon credit system we luckily don't have to collect data and report things that don't make sense. But we also try to get people engaged with these tokens by offering them to take part in the decision making around the project site. All of this requires a lot of communication that happens mainly digital and of course you run into the danger that this doesn't translate to real life interactions so we are also doing a lot of community building on the ground. We are trying to offer people a space to meet offline, engage with the project and open it up to make it a part of their lives rather than something they just follow online.Youth nowadays speak deeply about a heavy sense of climate anxiety and isolation, like shouting into a void with no community left to face their problems. In the time you’ve been interacting with Galician youth, how does the act of collectively grounding a different future start to heal that deep generational rupture?
What we need now is young people that envision a radically different future with a system that is supporting life rather than extracting and destroying it. Living in a world where you are bombarded with information no matter if it's relevant, absolutely devastating or simply trash and unnecessary is overwhelming for all of us.
At the same time people have become hyper connected through the digital world but still feel isolated because connection is way more than just seeing stuff on a screen. Trying to create spaces where young people can come together in real life, look at a specific and local problem and not only push them to envision alternatives but also to try to realise them seems to spread some hope.What would you say is the hardest part of this work that people never think about when they picture "rewilding"?
Most people think your core work is to restore an ecosystem and in a way it is for sure but the bigger part of the work and the one that is almost more important is to get the people on board. If these are the communities around you, the policy makers, grand givers, funders or other local businesses. If you want to see a systemic change at some point you cannot stay in your little ecosystem restoration box!
An internationally wrongful act in a courtroom; a regulation being redrafted in Brussels; a community in a Galician valley digging out eucalyptus stumps by hand… these are not separate stories. They are one single, everflowing river streaming down from international law straight into the living soil. Where international law names the crime and the obligation, local collective rewilding begins the physical repair.
