Areas against annihilation? : A critical assessment of the compatibility between biodiversity science and Swedish law on area protection

Abstract: In the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, science deems a system-wide, structural, and fundamental transformation of society necessary to mitigate severe risks for planetary and human health. These risks will escalate further if a paradigm shift in normative human-nature relationships is not realised. The legal system needs to change. This study aims to investigate what might be required of the legal system in order to ensure that Swedish areas are protected in accordance with what science deems necessary for the sufficient conservation of biodiversity. It assesses the compatibility between Swedish law on area protection and biodiversity science and suggests how said law can change to ensure this compatibility. The compatibility between biodiversity science and current Swedish legal mechanisms for area-based conservation of biodiversity is lacking. The mechanisms fail to create requirements, conditions, and possibilities that sufficiently ensure that protected areas are ecologically representative, organised in a well-connected network, implemented and managed effectively, and cover a sufficiently large total area. These compatibility shortages could be mitigated through limiting the possibilities to derogate from area-protecting provisions, increasing the stringency of protective legislations and regulations, expressly requiring the fulfilment of scientific criteria in legislation or regulations, or through establishing a comprehensive framework regulating the entirety of Swedish protected areas. There are currently no such rules addressing the size and structure of the totality of Swedish protected areas. The compatibility between Swedish law on area protection and biodiversity science is also lacking on a more foundational level. Swedish law on area protection is built on a foundation of an anthropogenic right to exploitation of nature, a prioritisation of economic interests, and a view of nature as property and humans as rights-bearing superiors. These normative foundations clash with the ecocentric conclusions of foundational biodiversity science that anthropogenic exploitation of nature must be mitigated, that ecological interests are and must be treated as prerequisites for economy, society, and humanity, and that urgent biodiversity-prioritising transformation of the paradigm governing our legal system is necessary. These compatibility shortages could be mitigated through changing the default of what humans are allowed to do to biodiversity, and through shifting the perception of which living entities are entitled to bear legal rights.