In late July, a mammoth’s jaw and tusks appeared on an exposed Danube riverbank near Ryahovo, in Bulgaria. The river had dropped far enough to give back an animal from a colder world. Falling water in Budapest uncovered an unexploded wartime bomb. At Prahovo, in Serbia, people swam beside the hull of a sunken German warship.
The media ran these stories as curiosities. They perhaps work better as a stratigraphy. A low river gives up its own history and ours, layer by layer, drought by drought.
Central Europe has long had a way of reading drought. Hunger stones lie in the beds of the Elbe and the Rhine, and dozens survive between Bohemia and Saxony. The stone at Děčín carries marks from 1536 to 2003. Its best known inscription tells the reader to weep on seeing it, and is usually dated to 1616. Hydrologists at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute have shown otherwise. It was cut around 1904 and recut in 1911 by a local man, Franz Mayer.
Their larger finding matters more than the correction. The people who cut these marks were recording the exact annual minimum, and the marks sit within four centimetres of the gauge readings. Five centuries of careful amateur hydrology, carved at the waterline, by people who understood that the low water mark was worth documenting. Read together, the stones show a slow decline in minima since the late eighteenth century.
Another Elbe stone offers another prophecy. When this stone goes under again, it says, life will blossom. In the midst of another heatwave European summer, how are old rules about its freshwaters being rewritten?
The thirsty atmosphere
Drought, in the popular imagination, means the rain stopped. The World Weather Attribution study published on 23rd July found something more complex. In western Europe, the low April to June rainfall carried no long-term climate signal at all. The rain was ordinary. The heat was not, and the heat changed what the rain did.
Potential evapotranspiration tracks how much moisture the atmosphere can pull from soils, plants and open water. Evaporative demand climbs exponentially with temperature. A warmer sky is a thirstier one.
The WWA found such conditions in western Europe had become roughly eighty times more likely under human-caused warming, and around forty times in the east. Agricultural soil drought is now about five times more likely in the west and eleven times more likely in the east.
The threshold has shifted. Rainfall deficits that once passed without incident now tip catchments into drought. An event of this rarity would have registered as moderate or severe in a climate 1.4°C cooler. It now registers as extreme.
The events also arrive earlier each year. Germany called 2018 a ‘Jahrhundertsommer’ (or ‘summer of the century’) after the Rhine spent 132 days at low water. This July the Danube sat at a level it did not reach until October that year. Europe has endured four heatwaves this summer already.
A river heatwave
Until recently we had no precise language for what heat does to a river. That changed fast. Three pieces of research in the past seven months have made riverine heatwaves a measurable thing.
A paper in Nature Communications in January mapped river heatwaves worldwide. Intensity and duration are both climbing, and river water temperatures rose 0.2°C per decade across the study baseline. Among the sharpest historical trends, the Rhine and Danube stand out for intensity, and the Rhine and Elbe for frequency.
A second paper, in Nature Geoscience, was published on 30th July. It covers 796 river basins across the United States and central Europe. Between the 1980s and the 2010s, riverine heatwaves rose 114% in frequency, 148% in duration and 95% in intensity. Atmospheric heatwaves rose by roughly a quarter to a third. Rivers are heating faster than the air above them.
The two trends increasingly arrive together. Compound events have tripled in four decades. When both hit at once, water temperature climbs a further 16% and dissolved oxygen drops another 2.9% against a river heatwave alone. Abhinav Dengri and Peter Greve reported a matching European pattern at the European Geosciences Assembly assembly in May, tracking compound low-flow and heatwave events back to 1960. Central and eastern Europe show the sharpest rises. The longest events, the ones that hurt ecosystems most, are multiplying fastest.
The physiology is blunt. Oxygen dissolves less readily in warm water, and fish metabolism roughly doubles for every 10°C rise, so demand climbs as supply falls. Salmonids start to struggle around 20°C. Mortality follows near 25°C. Low flows cut the turbulence that re-aerates water, and stretches go still. Warm, slow, sunlit water suits algal blooms, which shade out submerged plants, then collapse, and bacteria strip the last oxygen within hours.
The Nature Geoscience authors put the trajectory in stark terms. River systems may be shifting from episodic extremes to chronic thermal stress. Their colleagues in January said it more directly: extremes as we have understood them will stop being extreme.
Rivers already in trouble
None of this heat stress arrives in healthy freshwater systems. In April the IUCN published its updated European Red List of Freshwater Fishes, assessing all 558 native species. Some 42% face extinction and another 18% sit close behind. Migratory fish fare worst, their routes cut by an estimated million barriers. A global assessment launched in March put their decline at roughly 81% since 1970, and named the Danube a priority basin.
We have seen this pattern before. In 2018 Swiss authorities pulled about a tonne of dead grayling from the Rhine as temperatures passed 25°C, roughly 30% of the annual catch. By 2022 the Atlantic salmon that restoration managers had spent decades nursing back to the river could not reach their spawning grounds.
That August a bloom of the golden alga Prymnesium parvum killed around a thousand tonnes of fish on the Oder, along with most of its mussels and snails, across 500 kilometres. The analysis found no single culprit. The disaster needed chronic salt and nutrient pollution, acute heat and low discharge, all at once. A river carrying that much stress has little capacity left to absorb constant rolling heatwaves.
What it costs: economies, wildfires and groundwater
The Rhine has fallen to its lowest level since records began at Kaub in 1880. Navigable depth there dropped to 23 centimetres on Wednesday, under the previous record of 25 set in 2018, and forecasters expect it to fall further. The smaller tributaries feeding the river have run dry too, so recovery needs sustained rain rather than a cool week. Barges run at a fifth of capacity.
Hungary shut down the Paks Nuclear Power Plant on Sunday as a result of the drought, the first full closure in the plant’s 44-year history, stripping 40% of national energy generating capacity. More than 100 Hungarian towns and villages sit under water restrictions. Romania declared a state of emergency and detonated 180kg of explosives on the Bala canal to clear a rock and buy its remaining reactor a few days. The cruise ship Viking Ullur grounded on a Bulgarian sandbank on 28th July, and border police took off 186 passengers after those aboard ran out of food and water.
Fire and water make one crisis. The European Forest Fires Information System recorded 434,976 hectares burnt across the EU by 29th July, compared to 346,836 at the same point in 2025, the worst year on record. Dry soils feed fire. Fire strips the vegetation that holds water and shades streams. Groundwater is the quiet emergency. Slovak hydrologists report spring yields and groundwater below 20% of the long-term norm. Aquifers are so often out of sight, out of mind, but they keep headwaters flowing between rains, and take years to refill.
An ECB working paper this summer modelled 1,117 EU regions and found a compound heat and drought event on the 2022 scale would cut agricultural value added by an average of 4.54 percentage points. Related ECB work finds over 40% of euro area bank lending sits with firms exposed to drought and dependent on surface water. A companion study led by Sehrish Usman at Mannheim put the summer of 2025 at €43 billion in short-term losses, rising towards €126 billion by 2029, and called that conservative. The study excludes wildfires, and it excludes compound events where heat and drought arrive together. In other words, it leaves out the exact mechanisms driving this summer.
Catchments built for a climate that has gone
Specialists from Wetlands International Europe, WWF and the European Environmental Bureau identified the structural causes of drought at the end of July. Europe’s worsening exposure comes as much from two centuries of drainage as from the rate of warming.
Communities across the continent have drained wetlands, straightened rivers, cut off floodplains, dried peat and sealed soils. Each decision made sense within its own frame of flood defence, navigation or farm improvement. Together they stripped out the systems that hold water in wet months and release it slowly in dry ones. Europe engineered its catchments to drain. It now needs them to retain. Desertification already reaches thirteen member states.
Evidence is not the obstacle. Germany’s KliMaWerk programme found large-scale water retention more durable than isolated technical fixes, and named governance as the limiting factor. Jan Verkade of Deltares offered a useful reframing when he told CNN that droughts are the new floods. His colleague Marjolein Mens, speaking of Dutch conditions in July, said the country was already living through what modellers had mapped for 2050, arriving faster than expected and fitting the worst-case climate scenario. Water in the Rhine and Meuse stood at around 25°C that month, with blue-green algae spreading and fish dying.
In other words, our predictions of a climate crisis future are arriving now, and there is an urgent need for action. A rewetted peatland is an investment in a river’s condition decades out, and restoration timelines assume a reasonably steady target. The target has moved twenty-five years closer.
Strategies for managing drought
So what can be done in this time of drought and wildfire? In the Danube Delta, 700,000 hectares across Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, decades of damming made floods worse and the loss of native grazers let combustible vegetation build up. Reintroducing bison and other herbivores and reconnecting floodplains cut both wildfire and flood risk, and improved water availability for local farmers, which is what turned residents into stakeholders in the wetland’s survival.
The timing favours action. The Commission’s call for evidence on its climate resilience framework closes on 4 September. Member States are finalising National Restoration Plans, and the European Water Resilience Strategy folds water resilience into them. UNCCD COP17 meets in Ulaanbaatar this month.
The obstacle is political, and the diagnosis is not new. A 2016 survey of European drought policy found the continent still managing drought as a crisis rather than a risk, nine years after the Commission had called for exactly that shift. The Water Framework Directive governs water quality rather than quantity, and was drafted with northern Europe in mind. Member states were found to favour hard flood engineering over natural retention. The only EU instrument aimed squarely at drought is a Communication, which carries less weight than a Directive. Drought management plans remain voluntary, which is the same gap the World Weather Attribution team identified again last month. Twenty years of accurate diagnosis has not produced an obligation.
Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice-president for the clean, just and competitive transition, called the June heatwave a dramatic warning and blamed the retreat from environmental ambition on what she termed nonsense and ideologically driven lies from vested interests. The risk those NGO authors flagged is a framework that assesses risk without the mandate or money to reduce it.
Reading the riverbed
I keep returning to the mammoth in the Danube mud. It took a record drought to make it visible. The bones lay there the whole time, and our sightline moved.
The same will hold for what this summer costs ecologically. Fish kills, collapsed invertebrate communities, reaches that go anoxic in August and come back thinner in spring: most of it goes unnoticed and much goes unrecorded. It registers instead as a small downward shift in what people expect a river to hold. That is how shifting baselines work. Substitution, generation by generation, until nobody can say what has gone.
A summer like this briefly makes the invisible visible. Not only the bones and the shipwrecks. It shows the underlying condition. These rivers lost their capacity to hold water, buffer heat and absorb shock. People did that deliberately, over time, through the decisions they made. Other people can undo it through different ones.
The Danube will rise this autumn and cover the mammoth, the bomb and the warship. The conditions that exposed them remain the same. The memory is fresh now. The political consultation is open now. What gets decided in the next four weeks will shape these rivers for decades.
Nearly half of Europe’s lakes are failing to meet basic ecological standards – and with tens of thousands of degraded waters across the continent, there will never be enough money, time or attention to restore them all at once. So which lakes do we begin with? Who decides? And once the science is done, what keeps a lake healthy for the decades that follow?
In this second episode of the FutureLakes podcast, recorded at the midterm consortium meeting in Gdańsk, Poland, we travel to the restored Kartuzy lakes to explore the human questions at the heart of lake restoration: choosing, governing, and bringing people along. Project coordinator Laurence Carvalho (NIVA) makes the case for lakes as overlooked but vital ecosystems, and for a policy window now opening across Europe.
Maeve McGovern (NIVA) introduces a new framework to help governments decide which lakes to restore first. And Åse Johannessen (Deltares) reveals why governance – trust, coordination, and who’s invited into decision-making rooms – matters as much as any engineering.
On the banks of the Emscher River in Germany, wildflower meadows now bloom where raw sewage once flowed. Along the floodplains of the Danube in Romania, WWF scientists are coaxing water back into land that has been drained for generations, hoping to buffer the floods that climate change is making ever more severe. In Portugal’s Sorraia valley, restoration workers are navigating the competing pressures of intensive agriculture and a drying climate to give a degraded river system room to breathe. And in Belgium, volunteers led by citizen scientists are placing wooden structures in small urban streams, watching to see whether the invertebrates – the tiny organisms that signal a river’s health – begin to return.
These are not isolated restoration projects. They are part of a continent-wide experiment in what it would take to restore Europe’s freshwater ecosystems, not just in protected reserves and national parks, but everywhere, woven into the fabric of how the continent manages its land, its water, and its economy. That experiment is the MERLIN project, a four-year Horizon 2020-funded research and restoration initiative involving 47 partners from across Europe, which has now reached its conclusion. Its findings matter, and not only for ecologists.
The urgent need to restore freshwater ecosystems
Freshwater biodiversity is declining faster than biodiversity in any other ecosystem on Earth. Europe’s rivers have been straightened, dammed, disconnected from their floodplains, and polluted by agricultural runoff for generations. Most EU water bodies are still failing to meet the basic ecological targets set by the Water Framework Directive, despite two decades of legal obligations to improve them. Peatlands – which store vast quantities of carbon and buffer floods – have been systematically drained across the continent in pursuit of agricultural productivity. Wetlands that once filtered water and hosted extraordinary wildlife have been quietly erased from the map.
This is not purely an environmental tragedy, it is an economic miscalculation. A 2023 WWF report estimated the annual economic value of freshwater ecosystems globally at $58 trillion – roughly 60% of world GDP. The services those ecosystems provide – clean water, flood protection, carbon storage, food, recreation – are largely invisible in national accounts, treated as free goods until they disappear. When they do disappear, the costs fall on water utilities, insurance companies, public health systems, and ultimately citizens. MERLIN’s work has explored this theme directly with economists and ecologists, drawing a clear link between the health of rivers and the resilience of European economies. Clearly, freshwaters matter, both for people and nature, and their importance is particularly acute in a time of growing climate emergency.
What MERLIN set out to do (and did)
MERLIN’s full name – Mainstreaming Ecological Restoration of freshwater-related ecosystems in a Landscape context: INnovation, upscaling and transformation – gives some sense of its ambition. The project was not designed to protect a few flagship sites. It was designed to understand, and then demonstrate, how freshwater restoration could become the norm rather than the exception across European landscapes.
It did this through two parallel paths. The first was direct investment: nearly €10 million committed to hands-on restoration work at 18 flagship case studies, spanning peatlands and wetlands, small catchments and streams, and large transboundary rivers. By the project’s end, those sites had delivered 121 kilometres of restored river stretches and 7,274 hectares of restored floodplains and wetlands. These are not symbolic gestures. They represent measurable improvements in biodiversity, water quality, carbon storage, and flood resilience across Europe, from the Rhine delta in the Netherlands to the Tzipori watershed in Israel.
The second path was intellectual and institutional: building the knowledge, tools, policy frameworks, and financial instruments that would allow others to replicate and scale what those 18 sites had demonstrated. This is where MERLIN’s legacy is likely to prove most durable, and most consequential for European environmental policy.
Growing from core areas: the science of strategic restoration
One of MERLIN’s central research contributions is a Europe-wide analysis of where restoration investment is most likely to succeed. Using continent-scale datasets on freshwater habitat status, ecological pressures, biodiversity, and Natura 2000 protected areas, the project developed screening maps that divide the EU into discrete River Restoration Units. These underpin a spatial framework for identifying where the need for restoration is greatest and where the conditions for success are most favourable.
The strategic insight that emerges from this analysis is straightforward but vital: restoration works best when it builds outward from places where nature is already doing well. Existing Natura 2000 sites and other ecologically intact areas act as launch pads – or core areas – from which restoration can expand into surrounding landscapes. Rather than attempting to transform heavily degraded environments from scratch, the evidence points toward connecting these existing patches, rewetting adjacent peatlands, and reconnecting river channels with floodplains that have been cut off by embankments and drainage ditches.
A newer piece of modelling work goes further. MERLIN’s scenario maps, published in early 2026, integrate the Habitats Directive and Water Framework Directive into a Bayesian Network model to predict ecological status across Europe and derive spatially explicit restoration targets. They identify, for example, where improvements in floodplain connectivity or the removal of fish passage barriers are most likely to deliver measurable biodiversity gains. This kind of data-driven prioritisation tool is exactly what policymakers developing National Restoration Plans for the new EU Nature Restoration Regulation need, and MERLIN has made it openly available.
Monitoring what works: a new framework for restoration evidence
MERLIN kept a close eye on the success of its restoration projects, developing a standardised monitoring framework that assessed outcomes across 13 European Green Deal policy areas for all 18 case studies simultaneously. The results, assessed using a traffic-light scoring system that combined impact direction with data confidence, showed a high-confidence increase in biodiversity net gain and climate regulation. Restored floodplains reduced flood risk, rewetted peatlands stored carbon, and reconnected river stretches improved fish passage and aquatic invertebrate communities.
The monitoring work also identified limitations. Socio-economic outcomes were harder to measure robustly than ecological ones, and trade-offs were sometimes real: temporary pollution increases during earthworks, loss of some agricultural land at restoration sites, and disruption to existing land uses. The project was transparent about these tensions rather than glossing over them: an approach that is likely to strengthen trust in the overall evidence base. MERLIN’s monitoring handbook is now a public resource, designed to be used by restoration practitioners across Europe who want to generate comparable, policy-relevant evidence from their own sites.
An additional strand of citizen science work – training volunteers to monitor small streams using ecological protocols developed through the FLOW project – demonstrated that meaningful ecological data can be generated without professional ecologists on every riverbank. Community members in Ghent tested the approach, assessing stream health before and after simple restoration measures such as installing wood structures and planting native alder trees. The results fed into a peer-reviewed synthesis of 87 citizen science stream monitoring projects globally, providing the field with its most comprehensive overview to date of what works, and what doesn’t, when members of the public are asked to become the eyes and ears of ecosystem recovery.
Translating restoration ambition into European policy
MERLIN’s science lands at a moment of acute political urgency for European environmental policy. The European Green Deal – announced with considerable fanfare in 2019 as Europe’s roadmap to climate neutrality and ecological recovery – has had a turbulent passage. Its biodiversity strategy set ambitious targets for protecting and restoring nature across the continent, but it has faced sustained pressure from agricultural lobbies, a cost-of-living crisis, and the geopolitical shock of the war in Ukraine, which triggered a retreat on some green commitments in the name of food security. The Nature Restoration Regulation, finally adopted in 2024 after heated debates in the European Parliament, established legally binding restoration targets for rivers, floodplains, wetlands, and other habitats.
Member States now face the task of developing the National Restoration Plans which underpin this ambitious law by September 2026. Many countries are starting from a weak baseline of patchy ecological data, limited institutional capacity, and the kind of cross-ministerial coordination – between environment departments and agriculture ministries, between water regulators and spatial planners – that has historically proved elusive. MERLIN’s work arrives at precisely this moment of implementation anxiety, offering not just evidence of what restoration can achieve but valuable tools for getting it done.
One of the most significant policy contributions is a detailed analysis of the synergies and tensions between the Nature Restoration Regulation and the long-standing EU Water Framework Directive. Both laws focus on overlapping freshwater landscapes. Both set ambitious goals. But they have different institutional homes, different monitoring requirements, different timelines, and different relationships with agriculture, hydropower, and navigation sectors. Without deliberate coordination, there is a real risk they will be implemented in silos, duplicating efforts and missing the systemic interventions that only a joined-up approach can deliver. MERLIN’s policy brief on this subject offers a valuable guide to avoiding that failure.
Agriculture sits at the heart of all of this. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) distributes around €57 billion annually across European farming, shaping land management at a scale no restoration programme can match. MERLIN’s analysis of CAP design and reform – backed by a dedicated policy brief and an infographic contrasting business-as-usual farmland with restoration-integrated landscapes – makes the case that without CAP reform, freshwater restoration cannot reach the pace and scale that the Green Deal demands. A key question is how European subsidies and incentive structures could be redesigned to reward farmers who manage land in ways that benefit rivers and wetlands, rather than penalising them for it.
Working with economic sectors: from agriculture to insurance
Perhaps MERLIN’s most ambitious undertaking was its attempt to embed freshwater restoration into the mainstream operations of six economic sectors: agriculture, hydropower, insurance, inland navigation, peat extraction, and water supply and sanitation. The rationale was clear. These sectors both depend on, and impact freshwater systems. They hold assets, manage land, and make investment decisions at a scale that dwarfs public restoration budgets. If they could be persuaded – or given the right incentives – to treat river and wetland health as a business priority rather than an external cost, the trajectory of European freshwater ecosystems could fundamentally change.
The approach was to build what MERLIN called Communities of Practice: sectoral working groups that brought together businesses, policymakers, financial institutions, and NGOs to develop shared understanding and, ultimately, sector-specific strategies for integrating Nature-based Solutions. Six sectoral strategies were the result, accompanied by a set of infographics designed to make their content accessible to non-specialist audiences in multiple languages – from English and German to Basque and Portuguese, reflecting the genuinely pan-European ambition of the exercise.
The findings were nuanced. Water utilities emerged as perhaps the most immediately receptive sector: the business case for catchment-based natural solutions as an alternative to engineering – reducing treatment costs, managing drought risk, improving source water quality – is already compelling, and growing more so as climate pressures intensify. The insurance sector, too, showed real movement: as flood losses mount across Europe, insurers are beginning to price risk in ways that create financial incentives for floodplain reconnection and wetland restoration. Agriculture remained the most complex and contested terrain, not because farmers are hostile to restoration – as the project’s fieldwork repeatedly demonstrated – but because the current policy architecture does not make it easy or financially rewarding for them to act as land stewards.
The Cross-Sectoral Routemap, published in late 2025, maps 19 different economic actors relevant to freshwater restoration and proposes a pathway to 2050 built on five strategic action areas: legal and regulatory reform, shifting values and attitudes, knowledge and innovation, economic and financial instruments, and the building of collaborative institutions. Published alongside interactive storymaps, this work offers a blueprint for the kind of systemic change the Green Deal was always supposed to catalyse but has struggled to operationalise.
How to pay for mainstreaming freshwater restoration
One of MERLIN’s more uncomfortable findings concerns finance. Restoration in Europe is still overwhelmingly publicly funded, and private investment – despite considerable rhetoric about green finance and nature-positive business – remains marginal. The project’s research, documented in a dedicated deliverable on financing diversity, traced the barriers in detail: restoration teams lack the financial literacy to speak investors’ language; investors struggle to identify a credible return; and the regulatory frameworks that might make nature investable are still immature.
The response was practical. MERLIN developed a portfolio of twelve Off-the-Shelf Instruments – green bonds, biodiversity offsets, corporate sponsorship of natural areas, carbon sequestration credits, donation-based crowdfunding, public-private partnerships, and more – each presented as a plain-English, step-by-step guide for restoration managers with no financial background. An accompanying Investment Briefing Note – due to be published soon – addresses the investor side of the equation: what does it actually take for a restoration project to attract capital? The answer, the briefing argues, comes down to governance, measurability, and transparent reporting – the same rigorous evidence standards that MERLIN’s monitoring framework was designed to generate.
The MERLIN Marketplace, a digital platform connecting restoration practitioners with product and service providers, operationalises this ambition. With 60 registered products and services – from aquatic ecosystem assessment methods to innovative water treatment technologies – and 251 active users, it functions as a shop window for the growing freshwater restoration economy. The annual MERLIN Innovation Awards, held between 2023 to 2025, celebrated the best of this emerging sector, with prizes going to initiatives as varied as River Cleanup, a Belgian non-profit tackling river plastic at community scale, and Wasser 3.0, whose PE-X technology removes microplastics from polluted water for subsequent reuse.
Sharing knowledge: the Academy, podcasts and maps
Research findings have limited impact if they remain only in academic journals. MERLIN invested heavily in making its knowledge accessible, through a range of channels that together constitute one of the most comprehensive freshwater restoration knowledge environments ever assembled.
The MERLIN Academy is a free, publicly-accessible online learning platform structured around four certified modules: implementing and evidencing freshwater restoration; stakeholder engagement and governance; the economics and financing of Nature-based Solutions; and scaling up freshwater restoration and Nature-based Solutions in Europe. Each module combines expert-recorded video sessions, reading materials, interactive graphics, and quizzes, and leads to a MERLIN completion certificate.
The accompanying Knowledge Centre hosts over 220 curated resources – scientific publications, practical manuals, datasets, tools, and training courses – covering everything from restoration planning to alternative financing mechanisms. A series of webinars, totalling over 35 hours of expert presentations, is archived and freely accessible, as are 16 podcast episodes that follow restoration practitioners across the continent, from Portuguese streams to the Danube floodplains, offering vivid and accessible accounts of freshwater restoration on the ground.
Interactive storymaps bring a spatial dimension to this knowledge sharing, including one exploring the future of Digital Twin technology in restoration – the use of real-time data models to simulate how ecosystems respond to different interventions, enabling smarter planning and adaptive management. Project leaflets summarising the core ideas of MERLIN have been translated into ten languages, from Finnish to Romanian, indicating a commitment to reaching the communities closest to the rivers that need restoring.
What comes next for Europe’s freshwaters
MERLIN has been one of four large Horizon 2020 projects working on ecosystem restoration across Europe – alongside WaterLANDS, REST-COAST, and SUPERB – and the four have collaborated closely, co-authoring policy briefs and journal articles, and presenting jointly to EU institutions. Known together as the Green Deal Restoration Cluster, they have managed and coordinated restoration work at 71 sites across the continent. In March 2026, the cluster held a joint event in Brussels to present findings to EU and national decision-makers at a critical moment in the implementation of the Nature Restoration Regulation, feeding directly into the development of National Restoration Plans.
What MERLIN ultimately demonstrates is that the freshwater restoration challenge, in Europe and beyond, is not primarily technical. The core knowledge exists. The restoration techniques work. The benefits – ecological, social, economic – are real and measurable. The monitoring frameworks needed to track them are now in place. The financial instruments needed to fund them are on the shelf. The policy frameworks, imperfect and contested as they are, are broadly aligned with the right ambitions.
What has been missing, and what this project has spent four years beginning to build, is the connective tissue: shared language between ecologists and economists, trust between land managers and conservation organisations, policy coherence across ministries that have historically operated in silos, and financial structures that allow private money to flow toward public goods. These things are harder to create than a river restoration plan. They take longer to take root than a riverbank wildflower meadow. And they require a kind of persistence – in the face of political setbacks, budget pressures, and the perennial human tendency to treat environmental cost as someone else’s problem – that is not easily sustained.
But the rivers remain. The peatlands still hold carbon that took millennia to accumulate. The floodplains still have the memory, in their soils and sediments, of the water that once moved through them. Europe is entering what may be its most consequential decade for its natural environment. Whether that decade delivers on the promise of the Green Deal will depend less on grand declarations than on the slow, patient work of implementation: the monitoring, the financing, the cross-sectoral negotiation, the citizen science, the policy reform.
MERLIN has shown what that work looks like, and provides tools to make it easier. The question now is whether enough people – in government offices, in farmyards, in insurance boardrooms, on riverbanks across the continent – will pick them up and use them.
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All MERLIN research, tools, and resources are freely available at project-merlin.eu.
This article is supported by MERLIN.
MERLIN Podcast EP.16 – Four years, 18 sites, one mission: bringing Europe’s freshwaters back to life
In March 2026, MERLIN scientific coordinator Daniel Hering stood before a Brussels room full of European policymakers and set out what four years of freshwater restoration had found. The evidence is clear, the tools are ready, the Nature Restoration Regulation is now law. The question is whether the will – political, institutional, financial – can match the ambition.
A few days later, we joined MERLIN project coordinator Sebastian Birk and Ellis Penning – who coordinates the SpongeScapes project and helped moderate the Brussels event – on the banks of restored streams in Belgium’s Scheldt catchment. Away from the conference rooms and presentation slides, the conversation took a different shape, rooted in a landscape that is slowly and visibly recovering.
This final episode moves between those two worlds – the formal and the reflective, the policy stage and the riverbank. Between them, it captures something of what this landmark project has achieved, and what the freshwaters it set out to restore still need.
You can also listen and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Podcasts. Thank you for tuning in!
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
The stories we tell about water: reflections on science, policy and restoration in Europe
By Freshwater Blog editor Rob St John.
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Sit beside a river and it is hard not to be moved. Water flows, light flickers, birdsong echoes. The problem is that freshwater ecosystems have become increasingly disconnected from our everyday lives. Across Europe, rivers, streams, peatlands and wetlands have been degraded, straightened and drained for so long that most people have no living memory of how lively they once were.
Ecologists have a name for this phenomenon: shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation comes to accept the degraded ecosystems it inherits as normal, however diminished, and sets its expectations accordingly. What we no longer remember, we no longer miss; and what we no longer miss, we no longer protect. This quiet, intergenerational forgetting is one of the most significant structural obstacles to freshwater restoration in Europe, and it sits close to the heart of why policy ambition and ecological reality remain so persistently far apart.
I’ve spent the past four years making the MERLIN podcast. The project itself – a Horizon 2020 collaboration working across Europe to scale up freshwater restoration through Nature-based Solutions – has impacted both landscapes and law. The final podcast episodes released this month capture that double register. The penultimate episode is a candid Brussels panel discussion with WaterLANDS, SpongeScapes, SpongeWorks and EU policy makers, recorded at a pivotal moment in the implementation of the Nature Restoration Regulation. The final episode takes the conversation outside to a cold Belgian riverbank in the Scheldt catchment, where project coordinator Sebastian Birk and Ellis Penning reflect on what restoration looks – and feels – like after four years of work.
Across sixteen episodes I’ve spoken with ecologists, farmers, policymakers, economists, activists and community organisers from across Europe. What follows are some reflections on what that process has taught me – and what it might suggest for others working at the confluence of freshwater science, policy and communication.
Shifting from deficit to dialogue
The traditional model of science communication – produce knowledge, translate it, hope it changes public behaviour – was already under strain before the current political moment made its limitations unavoidable. Facts rarely speak for themselves in a new media age. Instead, people tend to make sense of new information through a complex and hyperconnected set of values, identities and preconceptions. A greater depth of knowledge, on its own, rarely shifts contested debates. Research on this topic is now three decades old and one conclusion is repeated: the reason this ‘deficit’ model persists is that it remains easier to produce information than to influence the cultural and political conditions in which it is received.
But the societal role of science is vital. What the legislative battles around the Nature Restoration Regulation revealed was just how actively and strategically scientific information can be contested by lobbyists. Analysis led by Guy Pe’er and colleagues found that inaccurate claims about food security and agricultural livelihoods spread rapidly during the critical legislative window, outpacing scientific rebuttal.
This is a pattern now recognisable across environmental policy debates. Researchers at the Centre for Countering Digital Hate have documented a broader shift in the tactics of organised opposition, away from outright denial of ecological harm and towards attacks on the credibility and desirability of solutions. The NRR campaign was a textbook example of this contemporary trend. The question for the scientific community is no longer whether to engage in public debate, but how quickly and how strategically it is willing to do so.
Arguably, then, the key obstacles to freshwater restoration in Europe are not primarily scientific. They are social, political and financial – shaped by entrenched interests, policy incoherence and a public imagination in which freshwaters have been rendered largely invisible. Communication, in this new media and political landscape, cannot simply be about informing. It has to help create the conditions in which environmental science can be acted on by both people and politicians. That means being willing to communicate, in public and at the right moment, when policy is failing to match its own commitments.
As such, science communicators need to acknowledge the place-based differences in how communities understand and value freshwaters; and to open spaces for listening and sharing in sometimes-tricky conversations. Embracing this shift from deficit to dialogue in how science circulates in the world is not a straightforward process, but it’s one that can help build trust, legitimacy and support in making restoration projects successful.
Building a communication ecosystem
If communication is to help foster positive change in the world, it has to be designed with intention. Different audiences don’t need simplified versions of the same message; they need different kinds of information, support and guidance depending on their needs and contexts.
In MERLIN, policymakers working on National Restoration Plans received a web app mapping restoration potential across Natura 2000 sites. Practitioners in agriculture, hydropower and other sectors got tailored guidance, translated and adapted for their own contexts – because the argument that will influence a Basque hydropower manager is not the same argument that will impact a Scottish land agent. The general public encountered before-and-after visualisations that help make ecological change visible without requiring technical knowledge. The MERLIN Academy offers open, certificated courses designed to outlast the project itself.
Part of the value of these tools is in how they connect. What emerges is something closer to a communication ecosystem: a network of entry points and pathways through which different people can find their way toward the underlying science. A podcast listener follows a thread to a policy brief; the brief leads to an infographic; the infographic opens onto the data. Taken together, the approach suggests a shift from communication as a set of deliverables toward something more like an ongoing public good, designed not just for now, but for years to come.
Making the case for storytelling
Storytelling still makes some scientists uneasy, as though narrative necessarily means a dilution of rigour. But evidence increasingly suggests the opposite. Stories are how people process complexity, build memory and, crucially, sustain emotional and political engagement over time.
Accordingly, in the MERLIN podcast I’ve aimed to amplify the small stories of people and place that shape freshwater restoration across Europe. One episode moves from dam removals in the Basque Country to training programmes in the Scottish Forth catchment, wildflower restoration along the Emscher, flood recovery in a Bosnian peatland and floodplain restoration on the Danube. These place portraits rarely offer tidy conclusions. Instead they are accounts of negotiation, uncertainty and persistence. Another episode centres community – a watershed in Israel shared across political and religious divides, German citizen scientists becoming ecological monitors, communities beginning to campaign for dam removals – showing how the social foundations of restoration are formed.
Episode 11, in which four early-career MERLIN researchers speak openly about what it means to work for ecosystems in a time of loss, touches something that technical communication rarely reaches. The researchers all speak about the importance of hope, not in grand policy outcomes, but in a restored floodplain, a returning fish species, or a farmer who changed their mind. Ecological grief, then, doesn’t necessarily represent a barrier to positive change. Acknowledged and placed, it can be its catalyst.
Audio is a fertile medium for telling these stories. Podcasts are free, portable, and increasingly woven into everyday life. They allow scientists and restorationists to speak expansively and honestly, and to acknowledge uncertainty, contradictions and hope. In an era when trust in science is increasingly contested, holding these spaces to openly talk about the complexities of getting freshwater restoration done is hugely valuable.
Opening policy windows
Timing is vital to science communication. Well-crafted research that arrives after a decision has been made has a fraction of the influence it might have had six months earlier.
So-called policy windows – those moments when political change becomes possible – have tended to be treated as things that happen to the scientific community rather than things it can actively help shape. Instead, David Rose and colleagues suggest that environmentalists can anticipate emerging windows and prepare for them, respond quickly when they open unexpectedly, frame their findings in the language that decision-makers are already using, and – perhaps most importantly – continue to build knowledge and relationships during the periods when windows appear closed. That last point is the hardest but arguably the most important, given the current political environment in parts of Europe.
MERLIN’s policy briefs were written to coincide with specific windows of political possibility. The brief on the relationship between the Nature Restoration Regulation and the Water Framework Directive arrived as Member States were beginning to work out how to implement both policies together. The brief on the Common Agricultural Policy landed while debates over post-2027 reform were live. The stakeholder engagement brief was published ahead of the approaching deadline for National Restoration Plans. Each brief speaks the language of its intended reader and makes specific asks of them.
Highlighting policy incoherence and systemic barriers at the moments when decisions are being made is one of the most direct ways science can influence outcomes. As we’ve seen in MERLIN, a key part of this process is maintaining a strong and responsive voice for the environment amidst wider economic and political pressures.
Communicating beyond the grant cycle
This notion of effectively timing communication also relates to the future. Large research projects tend to communicate most intensively in the months before they end. Outputs frequently appear in a rush, often genuinely useful but designed for a single moment, and within a few years most are difficult to find and rarely consulted.
Guided by Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber and Joselyn Verónica Arreaga Espin at BOKU University in Vienna, MERLIN took a different approach: open data tools, multilingual infographics, a training academy designed to outlive the project. The COALESCE initiative’s recent recommendations for science communication across Europe reinforce this approach. Their publication states that public engagement should be built into research portfolios from the start, resourced as the professional discipline it is, and not rushed at the end of projects when the budget is almost spent.
This blog has been working on a version of that logic for sixteen years, across more than 700 articles and a readership that has grown steadily through successive research projects. Its value lies in accumulated trust – a long-term community that recognises diverse voices and understands the complexity and nuance of freshwater issues. That kind of trust has to be built slowly, and tended. It grows from communication treated as an ongoing, collective endeavour rather than an individual project deliverable.
Listening as much as telling
Trust is not only important for communication, but also in the act of listening to the diverse voices around freshwaters. Restoration is not delivered by scientists and policymakers alone. It depends on a complex web of stakeholders – farmers, communities, water managers, anglers, boaters, industries and regulators – each with different priorities, constraints, backgrounds, and ways of understanding what a freshwater ecosystem is for.
Communication that assumes a single audience – out there, waiting to be informed – will likely fail. The sectoral work within MERLIN – tailored strategies and materials for agriculture, hydropower, insurance, navigation and others – reflects a different approach. It starts from what matters to different groups of people, and builds arguments, guidance and support that speak to those concerns. Making the case for restoration to an insurer requires understanding what an insurer is worried about. Making it to a farmer requires understanding what that farmer stands to gain and lose.
In this context, the Brussels panel in Episode 15 is striking for its candour. The panel and audience acknowledge that governance structures have not kept pace with the ambition of the Nature Restoration Regulation, and highlight the challenges of mainstreaming restoration at a continental scale. That openness is a quietly radical form of communication. It signals that the story is unfinished – that the scientists and practitioners involved are not claiming to have solved Europe’s freshwater crisis, but that collective, ongoing work amid uncertainty is necessary. This acknowledgement represents an invitation for audiences to engage with complex problems more deeply.
Navigating a crisis of narrative
This is a pivotal decade for Europe’s ecosystems. Despite a rocky path to adoption, the Nature Restoration Regulation is now law, and its National Restoration Plans are being written. Thanks to projects like MERLIN, the technical tools for restoration are more developed than at any previous moment.
But these tools alone are not enough. Rebecca Solnit has written that every contemporary human crisis is, in part, a storytelling crisis. The freshwater crisis is no different. Freshwaters have been made invisible not only by physical degradation but by a failure of collective imagination. We have largely forgotten how rich, biodiverse and lively freshwaters once were, and widely accepted the diminished versions of what they have become. We are hemmed in not only by degraded ecosystems and incoherent legislation but by inadequate stories about their causes, effects and solutions. Shifting baseline syndrome is, among other things, a narrative failure. The stories we tell about freshwaters are often the stories of what is left, rather than what could be.
Robert Macfarlane’s recent work on rivers argues for new grammars of animacy – ways of speaking about water that restore a sense of it as something alive and attended to, rather than a resource to be managed or a problem to be solved. This is not simply poetic ambition. The language through which people understand their relationship to freshwaters shapes what they are willing to do to protect them. When a river becomes, in public understanding, more than a drain or a water delivery system, the politics of restoration become possible in a way they weren’t before. Podcasts exploring rivers as cross-cultural meeting-places and the voices of early-career researchers reflecting on caring for ecosystems under stress offer, in different ways, attempts to contribute to that work.
George Monbiot has argued with growing force that the widespread degradation of freshwaters is the result of specific political choices – about privatisation, agricultural subsidies, and the resourcing of regulators – that can, in principle, be unmade. This matters because it reframes the problem. Degraded rivers are not an inevitable consequence of modernity; they are the result of human decisions, which can – with imagination, collaboration and persistence – be reversed. That is the form of hope Solnit describes: not the passive optimism of expecting things to improve, but the active recognition that outcomes are not yet determined, that what people do now matters to what happens next.
The stories we tell about freshwaters are not separate from the science of restoring them. They are part of how restoration can take root in the world.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
MERLIN Podcast EP.15 – How do you mainstream freshwater restoration across an entire continent?
The Nature Restoration Regulation is now European law. National Restoration Plans are being written. The targets are set. So why does transformative, large-scale ecological restoration remain so stubbornly difficult to achieve, and what would it actually take to make it happen everywhere, not just in flagship protected areas?
That question sat at the heart of a panel discussion held in Brussels in March 2026, at a joint event bringing together the EU Horizon projects MERLIN, WaterLANDS, SpongeScapes and SpongeWorks. Moderated by Ellis Penning of SpongeScapes, the panel brought together Anders Iversen and Willem Jan Goossen from the European Commission, Craig Bullock of WaterLANDS, and Sebastian Birk, coordinator of MERLIN, fresh from four years overseeing freshwater restoration work across 18 sites in very different corners of Europe.
In this episode of the MERLIN podcast we tune into that conversation, ranging across governance, finance, agricultural and environmental policy, and the challenge of building the kind of shared ecological literacy that makes transformative change possible. It is a candid, reflective and ultimately hopeful discussion, held at a moment when the tools and evidence for restoration have never been better, and the pressure to act has never been greater.
You can also listen and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Podcasts. Stay tuned for the final episode of the MERLIN podcast very soon!
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Asterix the insect: the caddisfly in a knockout contest
A small, easily overlooked insect from the Austrian Alps has found itself in an unlikely global contest this week.
The Asterix caddisfly (Ecclisopteryx asterix) has been selected as one of 64 species competing in the Indianapolis Zoo’s Uproar Conservation Challenge, an online vote where the public decides which species advances, round by round. The knockout tournament format means that each win brings both attention and funding to the species.
At first glance, the idea of pitching a freshwater insect against more charismatic contenders may seem a little lopsided. Caddisflies are not obvious crowd-pullers. They are small, often cryptic, and spend much of their lives underwater. But their ecological importance far outweighs their profile.
Caddisflies are a keystone of freshwater ecosystems. Their larvae help break down organic matter, recycling nutrients through rivers and streams. They are also a vital food source for many fish and birds, and are widely used by scientists as indicators of water quality. Where caddisflies thrive, clean, well-functioning freshwater systems usually follow.
The Asterix caddisfly itself is particularly specialised. It is found only in a handful of spring-fed streams in the southern Austrian Alps, making it highly vulnerable to disturbance. Like many alpine freshwater species, it depends on cold, clean and consistently-flowing water. Increasing pressure from water abstraction and damage to spring habitats threatens to disrupt those conditions.
There is still relatively little known about the species. Described only recently, it belongs to a small group of closely related caddisflies named after comic strip hero Asterix the Gaul and his companions. What we do know suggests a species with a narrow geographical range and specific habitat needs, which is often a warning sign in a changing climate.
This is where the challenge comes in. The Uproar Conservation Challenge, which opened for voting yesterday (16th March), will run over five rounds. Species are paired head-to-head, with only one progressing from each matchup. The further a species advances, the more conservation funding its supporting group receives – up to $10,000 for the overall winner.
For lesser-known freshwater species, this kind of visibility is rare. Conservation funding and public attention tend to gravitate towards larger, more familiar animals. Insects, despite underpinning entire ecosystems, are often left out of the conversation.
If the Asterix caddisfly is to stand a chance, it will need the support of the global freshwater community. Voting is open online, with each round lasting just a few days. In the first round, the species appears in pair 18.
The Asterix caddisfly may not have the obvious appeal of larger wildlife. But its story is a familiar one: a specialist species, confined to a shrinking habitat, quietly signalling the health of the environment around it.
Each vote for this remarkable insect represents a moment of recognition for freshwater biodiversity – a reminder that the health of rivers and streams depends on complex and beautiful webs of life which are often hidden out of sight.
What works in freshwater restoration? New research charts the course of successful projects – and exposes a farm policy gap
Europe’s rivers and wetlands are woven into the continent’s identity and economy. They supply drinking water, sustain agriculture, buffer floods and harbour a disproportionate share of its biodiversity. Yet they are also among its most damaged ecosystems, shaped by decades of drainage, river straightening, pollution and intensifying land use.
Two new publications offer a revealing snapshot of where Europe’s freshwaters are headed. One distils lessons from 18 real-world restoration projects across the continent, asking what it would take to scale up Nature-based Solutions from scattered pilots to systemic change. The other examines whether the EU’s €307bn agricultural subsidy programme is doing enough to support that ambition.
Together, they tell a story of growing practical know-how alongside a stubborn policy misalignment.
From isolated projects to continental-scale change
The first publication draws on experience from 18 demonstration cases implemented under the MERLIN project, an EU-funded initiative focused on restoring freshwater ecosystems through Nature-based Solutions. Its aim was not to evaluate ecological outcomes alone, but to understand the conditions that make restoration efforts scalable and lasting.
What emerges is less a technical manual than a framework for change. The authors identify five interlocking ‘building blocks’ that consistently underpin successful restoration.
The starting point, they argue, is a thorough review of ecological status and pressures. Projects that invested from the outset in understanding hydrology, land use and socio-economic drivers were better placed to address root causes rather than symptoms. A wetland cannot simply be reflooded if upstream drainage systems remain untouched.
But science alone is not enough. Equally important is what the authors call creating ‘narratives of the future’: shared, locally-grounded visions of what a restored landscape should look like and why it matters. In practice, this means bringing farmers, local authorities, water managers and communities into a common conversation. Where such narratives were absent, MERLIN researchers found that projects struggled to build momentum.
The publication also stresses the importance of adaptive, evidence-informed management. Freshwater systems are dynamic, and restoration projects rarely unfold neatly. The most effective ones embraced monitoring and learning, adjusting their approaches in response to new data rather than adhering rigidly to original plans.
Long-term financing proved another decisive factor. Restoration timelines often outlast political cycles and short-term funding schemes. Successful initiatives tended to blend public and private resources and think strategically about sustaining investment beyond the life of a single project.
Underpinning all of this is stakeholder engagement. Projects that treated participation as a central pillar – rather than a box-ticking exercise – were more likely to endure. Successful restoration, the MERLIN researchers suggest, is as much about governance and trust as it is about hydrology and habitat.
Crucially, none of this hinges on novel technology. Instead, it points to the importance of integration: aligning ecological science, community engagement and financial planning within complex social-ecological systems.
The CAP conundrum
If the first MERLIN publication offers a roadmap for scaling restoration, the second examines whether one of Europe’s most influential land-use policies is equipped to support it.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy will direct €307bn to agriculture and rural areas between 2023 and 2027. Given that farming practices – particularly drainage, river modification and nutrient runoff – are among the main drivers of freshwater degradation, the CAP should in theory be a central lever for change.
The reality, the authors find, is patchier than that.
Analysing CAP Strategic Plans submitted by EU member states, the MERLIN researchers map how different funding instruments relate to freshwater restoration. These instruments range from baseline environmental ‘conditionality’ rules and voluntary eco-schemes to rural development measures and investment funding.
While examples of good practice exist, interventions directly targeting key freshwater pressures remain limited in scope. Measures to reduce the impacts of agricultural drainage, restore wetland and floodplain connectivity, and increase water retention at landscape scale are present in many plans, but often peripheral. In many cases, they are add-ons rather than priorities.
The result is a patchwork. Some countries have embraced more ambitious water-focused schemes; others have taken a cautious approach. Overall, the authors conclude, successive CAP reforms have been incremental – and well short of transformative – on environmental objectives.
Ambition meets reality
Both publications sit within the wider context of the EU’s environmental agenda, including the European Green Deal and the Nature Restoration Regulation, which set bold targets for recovering degraded rivers, wetlands and floodplains.
Yet the research points to a persistent gap between ambition and delivery.
On the ground, restoration practitioners are learning how to work across sectors, manage ecosystems adaptively and build local support. They are working out what it takes to embed Nature-based Solutions within complicated, working landscapes. But a key financial engine shaping those landscapes – agricultural subsidies – is not consistently pulling in the same direction.
The knowledge needed to restore freshwater systems is growing, grounded in practical experience across diverse European contexts. The barrier to transformational change for Europe’s environments is thus less about ecological uncertainty than about policy coherence.
A pivotal moment for European freshwaters
With the current CAP period running to 2027 and debate on future reforms already under way, the MERLIN publications arrive at a critical juncture. They suggest that if Europe is serious about its restoration commitments, water-focused measures will need to move from the margins of agricultural policy to its mainstream.
That could mean stronger incentives for rewetting drained land, support for floodplain reconnection, and making landscape-scale water retention a core strategy rather than a niche option.
Freshwater ecosystems tend to remain out of sight until crises like droughts, floods or collapsing species populations strike. Yet they underpin both environmental resilience and human wellbeing.
The message from this new research is sobering but not defeatist. Europe has both the scientific understanding and the practical experience to restore its rivers, streams, peatlands and wetlands. What it needs now is for policy and funding to catch up with what practitioners on the ground already know.
Read the open-access articles in full
Birk S, et al (2026) Building blocks for upscaling freshwater ecosystem restoration: Place-based strategies for a transdisciplinary challenge. In: Kaden US, et al (Eds) Wetlands in a Changing Climate: Restoring Coasts and Floodplains. Nature Conservation 62: 261-287. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.62.148938
Rouillard J, et al (2026) Does the Common Agricultural Policy 2023–2027 support the restoration of freshwater ecosystems? In: Kaden US, et al (Eds) Wetlands in a Changing Climate: Restoring Coasts and Floodplains. Nature Conservation 62: 337-354. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.62.148845
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Beneath the Surface: The Future of Europe’s Lakes
Beneath the calm surfaces of Europe’s lakes, a quiet crisis is unfolding.
Once-clear waters are impacted by pollution, algae blooms and habitat loss, with nearly half of Europe’s lakes now failing to meet basic ecological standards. In this first episode of the FutureLakes podcast, we explore what’s gone wrong – and how innovation is opening new pathways to recovery.
The episode introduces FutureLakes, a three-year Horizon Europe project coordinated by the Norwegian Institute of Water Research, which is rethinking how lakes are restored across the continent. Moving beyond business-as-usual approaches, the project treats lakes as living laboratories, combining science, nature-based solutions, circular economy thinking and community engagement.
We hear from researchers behind a major global review of innovative lake restoration methods, led by Laura Härkönen of the Finnish Environment Institute. Drawing on more than 1,500 scientific studies and expert insights, the review reveals why traditional measures have fallen short and highlights promising new approaches that work with natural processes – from reducing pollution at source to recovering nutrients locked in lake sediments.
The episode then explores two contrasting demonstration sites: the Marker Wadden nature islands in the Netherlands, where biodiversity has rebounded at scale, and Denmark’s Lake Ormstrup, where nutrient-rich sediments are being removed and reused in agriculture.
Together, these stories show that restoring Europe’s lakes is possible – but it requires time, ambition and collaboration.
Tune in to find out how FutureLakes will drive this process forward in the coming years.
Across Europe, rivers, wetlands and floodplains have been quietly pushed to the brink. Straightened, dammed, drained and polluted, freshwater ecosystems are now among the most degraded environments on the continent. Yet a growing movement of scientists, policymakers and financiers argues that restoring them is not just an environmental necessity, it is an economic and social one too.
Two recent publications from the EU MERLIN project set out an ambitious vision: to scale up freshwater restoration across Europe and unlock the funding needed to make it happen. Together, they offer a glimpse of what a continent-wide transformation might look like, and the formidable barriers that stand in the way.
From scattered projects to continent-wide change
For decades, freshwater restoration in Europe has largely taken place in isolated pockets: a re-meandered stream here, a wetland revived there. While valuable, these projects have been too small and fragmented to reverse widespread ecological decline.
The new MERLIN European Scalability Plan argues that this approach is no longer sufficient. If Europe is to meet its environmental commitments – including biodiversity targets and water quality goals – restoration must happen at a fundamentally different scale.
That means moving beyond one-off projects towards coordinated, strategic interventions across entire river basins. It also requires integrating restoration into sectors where it has often been overlooked, such as agriculture, urban planning and infrastructure development.
The report calls for a shift in mindset: restoration should not be treated as a niche environmental activity, but as core public infrastructure which is as essential, in its own way, as roads or energy systems.
Why restoring freshwaters matters
At first glance, restoring freshwaters may seem like an ecological concern. But the benefits of restoration can extend far beyond biodiversity.
Healthy freshwater systems can reduce flood risks by reconnecting rivers to their floodplains, allowing excess water to spread out rather than surge downstream. They can improve water quality, support agriculture, store carbon and provide recreational spaces for communities.
In a climate emergency era, such Nature-based Solutions are increasingly seen as cost-effective alternatives – or complements – to engineered infrastructure. Instead of building ever-higher flood defences, for example, restoring wetlands upstream can help absorb and slow floodwaters naturally.
Yet despite these advantages, restoration has struggled to gain traction at scale. The reasons are not only technical, but also financial and institutional.
The restoration funding gap
A second policy brief, produced jointly by MERLIN with partner initiatives REST-COAST, SUPERB and WaterLANDS, focuses on this key question: how to pay for large-scale restoration.
The short answer is that current European funding systems are not fit for purpose.
At present, most restoration projects rely heavily on public grants, which are often short-term, competitive and fragmented across different programmes. This makes long-term planning difficult and limits the size of projects that can be undertaken.
Private investment, meanwhile, remains limited. Unlike renewable energy or transport infrastructure, restoration projects rarely generate clear, predictable revenue streams. For investors, they can appear complex, risky and unfamiliar.
The result is a persistent funding gap, formed despite widespread recognition of the need for restoration, and hampered by insufficient resources to deliver it.
Making freshwater restoration investable
To bridge this gap, the new policy brief calls for a fundamental rethink of how freshwater restoration is financed.
One key idea is to make projects more attractive to private investors. This involves standardising how projects are designed and measured, so that their benefits can be clearly demonstrated and compared.
For example, a restored wetland might reduce flood damage costs, improve water quality and enhance biodiversity. If these benefits can be quantified and, crucially, monetised, they become easier to incorporate into financial models.
Blended finance which combines public and private funding is another important tool. Public money can be used to reduce risks for investors, for instance by covering early-stage costs or providing guarantees. This, in turn, can help unlock larger pools of private capital.
There is also a push to better communicate the economic value of restoration. Rather than framing projects solely in environmental terms, proponents argue that they should be seen as investments in societal resilience: protecting infrastructure, economies and communities from climate impacts.
Finding space for restoration in European policy
While funding is a major challenge, both documents emphasise that policy alignment is also critical.
Europe has a dense and interconnected web of environmental policies, from water management to agricultural subsidies. But these are not always well coordinated, and in some cases they can even work at cross purposes.
For example, agricultural policies may incentivise land use practices that degrade waterways, while environmental programmes attempt to restore them. Without better alignment, efforts risk cancelling each other out.
The MERLIN reports highlight upcoming EU policy cycles as key opportunities. Reforms to agricultural funding, water management plans and new environmental legislation could all be used to embed restoration more firmly into mainstream decision-making.
The message is clear: scaling up restoration is not just about more money, but about using existing systems more effectively.
The need for scale and speed
A key theme running through both documents is the need for urgency.
Incremental progress, the MERLIN researchers argue, will not be enough. The scale of freshwater degradation combined with the accelerating impacts of the climate emergency demands a step change in both ambition and delivery.
This raises difficult questions. Can complex, locally specific restoration projects really be standardised and scaled without losing their effectiveness? Will private investors embrace a sector that has traditionally been seen as uncertain and slow to deliver returns? And can policymakers align diverse and often competing interests across sectors and countries?
There are no easy answers. But what is increasingly clear is that business-as-usual is not sustainable.
Green shoots for ambitious freshwater restoration
Despite the challenges, there are signs of momentum. Nature-based Solutions are gaining prominence in climate and economic debates, and the idea of investing in ecosystem restoration is moving from the margins towards the mainstream.
If the vision set out by the MERLIN project is realised, Europe’s freshwaters could look very different in the decades to come. Rivers which are less constrained and more resilient; wetlands which act as sponges for carbon and floodwaters: systems which are better able to support both nature and people.
But achieving that vision will require more than good intentions. It demands coordinated action across science, policy and finance, and a willingness to rethink how society values the natural systems on which it depends.
The question is no longer whether restoration is needed. It is whether European water managers, policy makers, scientists and environmental organisations can organise themselves to deliver it at the scale – and speed – required.
Read more
Mobilising Diverse Funding for Nature Restoration in Europe
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
The Freshwater Blog 