This Strategy adopted at the Environment Council held in Luxembourg on June 21st 2011 is considered by EU ministers as a key instrument to enable the EU to reach its overall 2020 headline target. Ministers also underlined that further discussion over the actions to ensure the effective and coherent implementation of the Strategy should still be put in place.

While supporting the new EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020, the Council has also expressed its concern about the fact that although some positive initiatives such as Natura 2000 network have been successful put in place, both EU and global biodiversity 2010 targets have not been met. EU Council has therefore encouraged Member states to integrate the Strategy into their national plans and programmes and make it part of their strategies.

The new Strategy aims to remove the main obstacles which prevented the achievement of the 2010 target. Among these obstacles are the inclusion of insufficient sectoral integration across EU policies - specially in the areas of agriculture, fisheries, water, climate and energy and other policies such as forestry; as well as shortcomings in the implementation of existing environmental EU legislation or the inadequate funding and specific policy gaps, relating to, among others, invasive alien species, green infrastructure, including ecological connectivity, and ecosystem services.

In their conclusions, EU Ministers highlighted that this is the first time that EU biodiversity policy will benefit from a substantial coherent knowledge framework. This framework will include the 2010 Biodiversity Baseline published by the European Environment Agency as an element of the benchmark for measuring progress with other indicators and will contribute to keeping the EU on track to reach its biodiversity objectives

They also recalled that the implementation of the Strategy is key to building a sustainable Europe. Furthermore, integrating the economic value of biodiversity and ecosystem services in public and private sector decision-making and accounting systems will contribute to a number of the EU’s strategic objectives towards a resource efficient and green economy. As highlighted by the European Commission in the presentation of its new strategy to halt biodiversity loss within ten years, the implementation of EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 will will contribute to the sustainable growth objective of the Europe 2020 Strategy by integrating biodiversity targets into the Resource efficiency roadmap.