In the ongoing debate about European security, a surprising voice has entered the conversation — Europe's top environment official — and her argument is one that conservation scientists have been quietly making for years.
**Jessika Roswall**, the EU's Commissioner for the Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy, has made a striking case: **restoring nature along national borders is not just good for wildlife. It's good for defence.**
"Investing in nature and using nature as a natural border control is necessary, and actually increases biodiversity. It's a win-win," she told the Guardian in March 2026.
**The Examples Already Working**
Roswall isn't speaking in theory. She's pointing to two real-world examples that have already happened at scale.
**Finland**, which shares an 830-kilometre border with Russia, has been rewilding areas near its frontier since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. **Poland**, which borders both Russia (via Kaliningrad) and Belarus, has done the same — including halting logging in portions of the ancient Białowieża Forest near the Belarusian border.
The principle is ecological but the effect is military: dense woodland, wetlands, and restored habitat make large-scale armoured movement genuinely difficult. Tanks don't move well through swamp. Infantry struggles to advance through thick forest. A landscape allowed to return to wildness becomes, as a side effect, a landscape that resists invasion.
"I've visited them: they transfer the land to more hostile nature, leaving bushes and trees. Then it's not so easy for others to cross it," Roswall said.
**Nature as Infrastructure**
Roswall's argument extends beyond borders. She is pushing EU member states to recognise that **healthy natural environments are strategic assets** — not just ethical or aesthetic ones.
This includes: - 🌊 **Wetland restoration** as flood protection — reducing the damage from climate-driven extreme weather events that can destabilise communities and strain emergency services - 💧 **Water security** — functioning ecosystems are the foundation of clean water supply, and clean water is, she argues, a national security issue - 🌾 **Food supply resilience** — healthy soils and pollinator populations are prerequisites for food security
"If we don't have water, we don't have security. Look at Ukraine — water infrastructure is under attack. It is crucial to invest in this infrastructure, and protect it," she said.
**The Biodiversity Bonus**
What makes the rewilded-border idea genuinely exciting is that the security and biodiversity benefits are not in tension — they reinforce each other. The same dense wetlands and wild forests that deter tank movements also:
- Provide habitat for endangered species - Increase landscape connectivity for wildlife corridors - Store carbon and regulate local climates - Filter water and reduce flood risk - Create opportunities for nature-based tourism in border regions
In Finland, wolves, lynx, bears, and wolverines are all present in greater numbers near the wild border zones. In Poland's Białowieża, Europe's largest herd of wisent (European bison) roams one of the continent's last primeval forests — a forest partly preserved precisely because its border location made development inconvenient.
**A New Security Vocabulary**
Roswall's framing — nature as infrastructure, biodiversity as resilience, rewilding as defence — represents a genuine shift in how the EU is beginning to talk about environmental policy. Rather than positioning nature protection as a constraint on economic or security interests, she's arguing that the two are aligned.
"We need to invest in nature," she said. "That's also a security issue."
If that argument gains traction — and it is gaining traction, at the highest levels of European policy — the next generation of European defence investment might include not just fighter aircraft and missile systems, but wetland restoration, forest corridors, and rewilded buffer zones along thousands of kilometres of vulnerable frontier.
The wolves, bison, and lynx that benefit probably won't care about the strategic logic. But they'll benefit all the same. 🌿🐺
*Sources: The Guardian (March 9, 2026) · Positive.News Week 11 2026 · EU Environment Commissioner interview · Białowieża forest restoration reports*
