Finance, monitoring and people: planning the ambitious restoration of Europe’s ecosystems

Last year, Europe adopted an ambitious new law committing to restore the continent’s degraded ecosystems.

The Nature Restoration Regulation is the first continent-wide, comprehensive law of its kind. It aims to reverse biodiversity loss, strengthen climate resilience, and support long-term environmental and economic sustainability. Previously termed the Nature Restoration Law, the legislation compels European countries to restore at least 20% of their degraded ecosystems by 2030, and all degraded ecosystems by 2050.

Each EU Member State must now develop a National Restoration Plan to kickstart the new legislation’s ambitious goals. These restoration plans – due in 2026 – will offer a roadmap for how Europe’s ecosystems can be brought back to life over the coming decades.

A key part of this process involves absorbing lessons from the cutting-edge restoration research and practice currently taking place across Europe. Four major EU nature restoration projects recently met in Brussels to discuss evidence-based recommendations to help European countries develop their National Restoration Plans.

The four projects – MERLIN, REST-COAST, SUPERB and WaterLANDS – have spent the last four years developing innovative approaches to restoring Europe’s freshwaters, coastlines, forests and wetlands. The projects share a focus on the potential of nature-based solutions – using natural processes to help benefit both people and nature – to help achieve this goal.

Three key themes emerged from the Brussels meeting. First, the importance of securing adequate, long-terms funding for restoration. Second, the need to develop robust monitoring, indicator and prioritisation tools to help make good decisions about long-term restoration management. Third, the vital role of engaging the public and policy makers to generate trust and support for restoration initiatives.

Financing long-term restoration projects

Funding long-term restoration projects through National Restoration Plans is a key challenge for EU countries. Whilst there is no dedicated EU funding stream to support the plans, they can be supported through existing national and EU programmes – such as the Common Agricultural Policy – as well as innovative private sector investments such as carbon credits and payments for ecosystem services.

The four projects highlight a number of challenges in accessing funding through these channels. They suggest that biodiversity and carbon monitoring can be tricky to link to financial outcomes, and as a result private companies can be hesitant to invest in restoration due to concerns over ‘greenwashing’. Similarly, ‘nature credit’ schemes can be challenging to implement and regulate due to difficulties over monetising ecological gains whilst avoiding negative outcomes.

Further, it’s highlighted that awareness of new financial schemes is often low amongst local and national authorities. In particular, there is the need to communicate the potential of business models based on nature-based solutions approaches to help stimulate their uptake.

The four projects offer individual lessons on how to overcome these barriers. For example, WaterLANDS identify three steps: building knowledge on sustainable finance; taking action to test new business models; and identifying pathways to upscale innovative finance models across the continent. MERLIN has built a financial workflow for restoration activities, and offers ‘off-the-shelf instruments’ to support financial solutions for restoration.

The projects state that to attract private sector investment into restoration, it is vital to demonstrate that revenue generation and business opportunities from nature are viable. They highlight the need to develop methods and tools that value the benefits nature provides to people.

They advocate for public-private partnerships where nature restoration is regarded as an investment which can not only generate revenue, but also avoid future costs and risks, for example as the result of flooding or drought.

To support such schemes, there is the need to implement financial instruments. For example, REST-COAST explore the application of ten financial instruments – including green bonds, blockchain tokens and eco-labels – in supporting restoration. Both MERLIN and WaterLANDS outline the difficulties of quantifying costs and revenues in freshwater ecosystems, particularly over long timescales.

The four projects state that there is a need for governance strategies that help combine public funding with private sources to support the long-term financing of restoration, whilst also overcoming the multiple challenges these approaches can involve.

Upscaling nature restoration: monitoring, indicators, prioritisation, trade-offs

Upscaling is an increasingly-heard term in European restoration: it points to the need for ecosystems to be restored and joined up, not only at individual sites, but across a continent-wide network of living habitats. The four projects highlight the need for effective monitoring strategies to be developed to allow restoration managers to address different priorities and trade-offs in helping foster this European network of healthy, diverse ecosystems.

Monitoring is crucial for understanding the impacts of restoration activities, and allow managers to track progress over the long timescales it takes for a forest to grow or a peatland to form. SUPERB has developed a series of restoration work plans that help managers address factors like site selection, monitoring and stakeholder strategies, whilst MERLIN has produced a Flexible Indicator System which helps projects align their environmental, social and economic impacts with those of the EU Green Deal.

All four projects highlight the potential of innovative new monitoring techniques like eDNA, AI, citizen science and acoustic modelling in supporting large-scale data collection. Moreover, they point to the wealth of existing data already available to help guide restoration projects, such as that collected in the Water Framework Directive. There is a need to make such large and complex datasets more accessible to restoration managers seeking to plan and monitor their own projects.

Upscaling nature restoration across the continent will require significant prioritisation and trade-offs to help bring healthy, diverse ecosystems back into daily life. Prioritisation in National Restoration Plans could focus on factors including feasibility, ease of implementation, landscape connectivity and actions that deliver multiple benefits, or on the protection of rare or threatened habitats. The projects highlight the potential of economic cost-benefit analyses to help assess such trade-offs.

Effective restoration requires targets and monitoring systems that address multiple goals simultaneously. For example, restoration work on the Emscher River in Germany – supported by MERLIN – has improved water quality and habitat whilst providing new spaces for recreation. Similarly, WaterLANDS work on the Great North Bog in the UK is restoring peatlands for increased biodiversity and carbon storage, whilst simultaneously helping boost water quality and flood mitigation downstream.

However, such work often involves trade-offs, as found by the SUPERB project in their projects along the Danube river floodplains. Here, intensive poplar plantations are being increasingly converted to natural oak forests to benefit biodiversity, but this process temporarily reduces carbon storage and timber yield. To navigate complexities like these, SUPERB has developed a series of interactive maps to highlight policy coherences (and incoherences) between national forest laws and the Nature Restoration Regulation across Europe.

The importance of people: stakeholder engagement and governance challenges

Nature restoration is never solely about biodiversity and ecosystems: it is deeply related to people, too. As a result, our social, cultural, economic and political systems are entwined in restoration projects, particularly when the ambition is to mainstream restoration across the continent.

As a result, the four projects highlight the need for effective governance and stakeholder engagement in gaining trust and support for restoration projects. They outline a range of governance challenges that EU Member States will face when designing National Restoration Plans. These include addressing conflicting interests and priorities amongst different communities, ensuring the uptake of restoration on the ground, and mobilising ongoing public support.

Sensitively and effectively managing these challenges is key to the long-term success of restoration projects, the contributors argue, and can help maximise their social, economic and ecological benefits. Evidence from the four projects shows that stakeholder engagement, collaborative decision-making and holistic thinking are central for addressing these challenges.

Key to this work is integrating top-down approaches – which are led by national decision makers – and bottom-up approaches – which are led by public and community groups – into restoration planning. The four projects highlight that in so doing, National Restoration Plans can align with existing European policies whilst ensuring national level commitment and local buy-in based on trust and integration.

All four projects share this multi-level engagement with people in making restoration projects happen. For example, REST-COAST’s pilot sites are based on collaborative, ‘living lab’ decision-making processes which bring together multiple perspectives on restoration. Similarly, WaterLANDS has developed detailed guidelines on deliberative decision-making processes which integrate social and economic considerations with ecological assessments.

The four projects also highlight the need to address governance barriers and policy incoherences which can hinder ambitious restoration projects. A key obstacle is the difficulty of aligning different priorities, such as biodiversity conservation, agriculture, forestry and urban development. This is compounded by the fragmented nature of policies across European, national and local levels, and the short political cycles underpinning government decision-making.

These challenges can be overcome by developing integrated policies that encompass multiple interests – for example, from climate, water and environmental policy – from EU to national and local levels. A holistic perspective which focuses on the whole landscape or ecosystem can help integrate nature restoration goals into such broader objectives, the four projects suggest.

Finally, the four projects emphasise the need for effective stakeholder engagement in fostering trust, support and uptake for restoration projects. Engagement is different from communication: it requires open dialogue, trust building and co-creation, and it aims to ensure that all interests and values around a landscape are meaningfully considered and integrated.

This article offers only a snapshot of the detailed recommendations offered by the four projects, which can be read in full in the EU report here. The insights it offers should be hugely valuable in helping scaffold the next chapter of ambitious ecosystem restoration across Europe.

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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.