Authors: Mauerhofer, Volker;

Biodiversity is continuing to decrease widely and manifold echoed calls for reversing this trend need support from more effectively formulated and implemented rules-of-law. The UN Post 2020 Biodiversity Framework to be concluded in May 2022 contains in the past and current drafts an overall vision for global net improvements till 2050 and already some goals and targets for concrete net gains. The overall goal of this contribution is to show how the EU Habitats Directive already in its current version contributes and can further contribute to such biodiversity net gains, besides the actions outlined in the 2020 EU Biodiversity Strategy also referring to the Net Gain Principle. Hermeneutic methods are applied such as comparative legal analyses and different types of text interpretation (e.g. historic, wording, rational). The findings identify three major parts of the EU-Habitats Directives where the implementation of the objective to achieve net gains can be legally based upon, namely the maintenance, the restoration and the compensation. The results show the already current potential of the Habitats Directive to contribute through an implementation of EU’s Net Gain Principle to the overall global vision toward net improvements of the UN Post 2020 Biodiversity Framework.