European Union politicians are at odds over how to restore the continent's rapidly deteriorating natural habitats and the fate of a proposed nature law hung in the balance on Thursday after a chaotic parliamentary vote.

 

EU lawmakers, who have been battling for weeks over the proposal to restore nature on 20% of EU land and sea, did not reject the bill entirely but ran out of time to agree on what binding measures it should contain.

 

"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.

 

The European People's Party, the EU parliament's biggest lawmaker group, had 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. The proposal to turn around the ailing health of Europe's natural habitats - 81% of which are classed as in poor health - has also faced pushback from government leaders including in Belgium and Ireland.

 

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 the task by the meeting's end.

 

The voting will resume on June 27, before a decisive vote in the full EU Parliament.

EPP lawmaker Peter Liese said he was confident the full EU Parliament would reject the proposal, after Thursday's vote exposed how lawmakers were "completely split" over it.

 

EU countries plan to agree their position on the law next week. Draft negotiating documents seen by Reuters showed countries plan to weaken, but not reject, the law. (Reuters)