Innovating european nature conservation law by introducing ecosystem services

Whereas the importance of the concept of ecosystem services is growing ever stronger in other scientific disciplines, law discourse does not seem to be very aware of it. As this paper advocates, EU nature conservation law would greatly profit from adopting the concept of ecosystem services, thus giving more weight to sustainable development demands. Instead, the European Court of Justice recently lost some momentum. Although it easily could have adopted the concept into the Natura 2000 appropriate assessment, the court fell back on a rigid application of limited conservation objectives