Fate of EU nature law uncertain after chaotic first vote

But the political debate over the bill continues to rage, and even those lawmakers that support the law have struggled to agree what binding targets and measures it should contain. Lawmakers in the European Parliament's environment committee spent more than three hours voting on hundreds of amendments to the law on Thursday - and still failed to complete this vote by the meeting's end.

The fate of the European Union's flagship law to restore nature hung in the balance on Thursday after a lawmakers decided not to reject the bill entirely but then ran out of time to agree what should be in it. EU lawmakers have been battling for weeks over the proposal to restore nature on 20% of EU land and sea, in a bid to halt the plummeting health of species' natural environments across Europe.

The European People's Party, the EU parliament's biggest lawmaker group, has called for the proposal to be rejected entirely on the grounds that it would hurt farmers and food security. Those claims have been rejected by

thousands of scientists . But the political debate over the bill continues to rage, and even those lawmakers that support the law have struggled to agree what binding targets and measures it should contain.

Lawmakers in the European Parliament's environment committee spent more than three hours voting on hundreds of amendments to the law on Thursday - and still failed to complete this vote by the meeting's end. The voting will resume on June 27.

The committee narrowly rejected a proposal to throw out the law completely. An attempt to pass a compromise deal on the overall law also failed. "We know what we don't want, but we don't seem to know what we do want," Green EU lawmaker Bas Eickhout tweeted during the vote.