Where did Natura 2000 go wrong?

Natura 2000 is the flagship of the EU environmental strategy regarding biodiversity with key instruments being the Birds- and Habitats Directive (BHD). However, such a recent large-scale project is not exempt from critique and there seems to be a need for improvement. In 2015, in the EU biodiversity strategy review, the European Commission considered that there were still fields for enhancement mainly about the marine field, Natura 2000 management and its funding. This paper thus seeks to better understand where Natura 2000 went wrong by identifying its main weaknesses and bad practices.