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As many as 63 per cent of voters in Switzerland rejected an initiative to intensify the country’s biodiversity conservation efforts on September 22, 2024.
The main opposition group, the farmers, campaigned against the plan saying that the restrictions will disturb the balance between protection and profit, and eventually threaten food security. There are rules already in place to preserve natural ecosystems that they follow while carrying out their economic activities, they argued.
The other strong voice of dismissal came from the energy lobby that said these stringent laws will act as hurdles in Switzerland’s path towards renewable energy. The ‘too extreme’ plan will not succeed and eventually backfire, the business groups maintained.
Half of all natural environments and a third of natural spaces threatened in Switzerland, according to the country's Federal Office for the Environment.
“Over the course of the campaign, supporters of the initiative were simply unable to dispel these fears,” according to Swiss public television, SRF.
The Farmers’ Union’s campaign overpowered that of the heritage conservationists favouring the plan, for one salient reason, Urs Bieri, political scientist at the gfs.bern research institute, told the news portal Swissinfo.ch. While the problem of ecological degradation was widely understood, he said, the particular solutions laid down in the rejected text failed to unify a large cross-section of the voters because of its impact on agriculture.
The results also made clear that there is a wide perception gap between people in rural Switzerland and those living in cities when it comes to biodiversity conservation. “The text was rejected by a majority of cantons, with high “no” proportions in rural regions such as Valais (73.9 per cent), Appenzell Inner-Rhodes (74.6 per cent), Nidwalden (75.8 per cent) and Schwyz (76.6 per cent). Voters in cantons Geneva (51.2 per cent) and Basel City (57.7 per cent) and several cities, including Lausanne (60 per cent) and Lucerne (53 per cent), said “yes”,” read a Swissinfo.ch report.
This gap between the urban “yes” and rural “no” has the ability to upturn any ecological initiative that is limited to the left-green camp, Bieri noted in his analysis for the Swiss news portal. Such referendums “must make an impact in the political centre or even to the right”, he added.
The results are part of a trend, the expert noted, that defined the ecological legislation landscape since 2012, when the Second Homes initiative won the public mandate – the last such referendum to do so. In that, a majority of the voters agreed to go ahead with a plan to limit the construction of second homes in Swiss communes.