Protected areas are necessary but not sufficient to rehabilitate biodiversity to a favourable conservation status across the country and to maintain the provision of ecosystem services. Reaching the 2020 target implies, inter alia, the development of a green infrastructure with a focus on representativeness and management effectiveness at land and at sea, the restoration of degraded areas and ultimately the compensation of new degradations if not avoidable (see operational objective 3.8).

The Green infrastructure (GI) is defined as a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features designed and managed to provide a wide range of ecosystem services. It incorporates green spaces (or blue if it concerns aquatic ecosystems) and other physical features in terrestrial (including coastal) and marine areas. On land, GI is present in rural and urban settings (EU Commission, May 2013). More information on GI is provided in the box in objective 3.

As small landscape elements play a key role in ensuring connectivity of a green infrastructure network, their conservation and/or rehabilitation will be promoted. The management of the green infrastructure should apply the ecosystem approach and be integrated into its socio-economic context. Indeed, it is necessary to step up efforts to integrate biodiversity into the development and implementation of other policies, taking into account the objectives of all policies concerned, in particular those national and EU policies on natural resources management, such as agriculture, food security, forestry, fisheries, and energy, as well as spatial planning, transport, tourism, trade, and development. Measures taken within the framework of Objectives 4 (sustainable use) and 5 (sectoral integration of biodiversity) of the NBS should particularly take these green infrastructure elements into account.

Building a green infrastructure can help overcome many of these challenges. It can reconnect fragmented natural areas and improve their functional connectivity and resilience within the wider countryside. Connectivity, restoration and conservation measures need to be mainstreamed throughout the entire territory and not limited to specific areas, to contribute to an ecologically coherent green infrastructure for the benefit of all, people as well as nature. Furthermore, the restoration of degraded ecosystems can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Belgium currently works with the European Commission on the common understanding and operationalisation of the terms "restoration" and "degradation" and the nature of the 15 % target. The baseline (reference point) against which the 15 % restoration target is to be assessed is the EU 2010 Biodiversity Baseline Study produced by the EEA and supplemented by additional information to be generated through the MAES work programme. At the core of the concept is the idea that restoration should be regarded as a process rather than as a binary (restored vs. degraded) description of the state of play. If restoration is regarded as a process then this allows for the possibility of identifying different stages in the process. It also means that all significant efforts to improve the abiotic and biotic condition of a site can, in principle, be counted as a contribution to restoration even if the site is not fully restored to its "original/natural state". The approach also has the advantage that significant efforts to improve the ecological condition of a site that has been completely transformed (e.g. intensively farmed land) can also be taken into account.

In order to ensure resilience, evolving factors such as climate change will be taken into account when restoring ecosystems. Attention must be paid to the slow changing processes. Climate change or deposition of nitrogen, for instance, can have an irreversible effect on the “natural” population, the “natural” range of the species and on the “sufficiently large” area, which are factors that determine whether a species or habitat has a favourable conservation status (see box, Objective 3). Applying an adaptive management process is a good way of getting management to take such processes into account.