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.