The two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have appealed to the Minister of Environment and Climate Action, for the registry to be created within a maximum period of six months, once there is an indication that the Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests (ICNF) is preparing a proposal for a legislative document for this purpose.

They have also appealed to the deputies of the Assembly of the Republic to “inscribe this issue as a priority on their agenda, with a view to carrying out their inspection action on the Government in the area of the environment, over the next few months”.

The national register of classified natural values is an operational instrument that consists of an information file on plant and animal species considered to be threatened, according to the criteria from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

The two NGOs state that the creation of the register, foreseen in legislation for almost 13 years, “will allow legal protection to all species with a threat status that occur inside and outside classified areas”

With the creation of the register, according to Zero and the Portuguese Society of Botany, certain acts likely to threaten classified plant or animal species, such as acts of harvesting, capturing, transporting or marketing, will be considered environmental infractions, which may lead to fines of up to €200,000 for individuals and €5 million for companies.

For these two NGOs, "there are no objective reasons to delay the creation of the register", since most of the information necessary for its production is already available.

These organisations also recall that, of the 630 plants evaluated as being on the red list of vascular flora in mainland Portugal, 381 are threatened but only 17 percent of the threatened plants currently benefit from some legal protection.