Can nature-based solutions help ‘green’ European economies?
As the ongoing effects of the climate emergency and ecological crisis continue to be felt across Europe, it is clear that ‘business as usual’ in our society’s relationships to nature isn’t working. In recent years, the EU MERLIN project has worked with representatives from six key economic sectors across Europe to explore how this relationship could be fundamentally transformed, to benefit both people and nature.
This work centres on the promise of nature-based solutions in ecosystem restoration. Nature-based solutions – such as peatland and river restoration – aim to use natural processes to help tackle socio-environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and flooding.
One key element of nature-based solutions is that they are designed to offer clear economic and social rationales for the value of protecting and restoring natural environments. Advocates of nature-based solutions suggest that this helps strengthen arguments over the value of mainstreaming environmental restoration to benefit all our lives.
MERLIN recently released six strategies exploring how the agriculture, water supply and sanitation, peat extraction, insurance, hydropower and navigation sectors can be ‘greened’ through better adoption of nature-based solutions.
“Over the past three years the project has engaged with the six economic sectors, involving more than a hundred stakeholders from the private and public sector through roundtables, interviews, written comments and feedback, and using these activities to form a sectoral community of practice to encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration,” says strategy editor Anna Bérczi-Siket from WWF Hungary.
“The results of this sometimes-bumpy journey are embedded in the six strategies and their actions, with the purpose to highlight how sectors can take an active role in safeguarding Europe’s freshwater resources, and to help them benefit from the transformation,” she says.
You can read the full strategies on the MERLIN website, and listen to a podcast on the sectoral collaborations here.
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Agriculture
Farming shapes almost 40% of European landscapes, providing vital food security and rural employment, but also significantly contributing to habitat loss and water pollution across the continent. At the same time, the agricultural sector is facing significant challenges such as drought and flooding as a result of climate change alongside rising production costs caused by wider geopolitical events.
Policy makers have long sought to ‘green’ European agriculture through the Common Agricultural Policy, the Green Deal and the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies. The MERLIN strategy works in this context to emphasise the agricultural sector’s critical role in addressing biodiversity loss, climate crisis, and soil and water degradation, while promoting sustainable farming practices that secure food production and ecosystem health.
The strategy envisions a transformed European agricultural sector with nature-based solutions at its heart by 2050. To get there, the strategy outlines six key actions. First, it emphasises the need to educate and assist farmers to integrate nature-based solutions into their practices. Second, it highlights the need to build public awareness and support around the need for such approaches to make European farming more sustainable.
Third, it argues that existing policy frameworks – particularly the Common Agricultural Policy – require reforms to better support nature-based solutions. Fourth, it highlights the role of landscape partnerships between farmers, municipalities, NGOs and citizens to help align agricultural practices with ecosystem restoration goals.
Fifth, the strategy emphasises the potential of recent innovations in farming technologies to help promote more sustainable practices. Finally, it highlights the need to secure market support for nature-based solutions in agriculture – for example through eco-labelling – to reward farmers for their contributions to ecosystem recovery.
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Water supply and sanitation
The water supply and sanitation sector oversees drinking water and wastewater activities for households, industrial, agriculture and commercial customers. Europe’s sewage network and wastewater treatment plants are managed by a mix of public utilities and private operators.
Engagement with stakeholders in the sector identified three main obstacles to the adoption of nature-based solutions. First, the sector has a longstanding engineering culture, which prioritises technical and built solutions to ensuring clean water provision. Second, it is currently more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of nature-based solutions in helping provide clean water, when compared to traditional engineering approaches. Finally, the governance of nature-based solutions is often complex: requiring collaborations between sectors across landscapes.
The MERLIN strategy proposes three actions to dismantle these barriers. First, it highlights the need to equip engineers and water operators with the expertise to design and implement nature-based solutions. Second, it advocates for standardised decision-making tools to be developed to allow water managers to evaluate the impact and cost-effectiveness of nature-based solutions. Third, it demonstrates the need for nature-based solutions to be better embedded in EU and national policies, in order to create regulatory and financial incentives for water managers to adopt them.
The strategy envisions a future where by 2036 Europe’s water supply and sanitation sector prioritises nature-based solutions. Backed by evidence and strong policies, this situation places nature-based solutions at the heart of Europe’s clean water supply, helping restore ecosystems, boost biodiversity and foster climate-resilient communities.
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Peat extraction
The peat extraction sector supplies peat for horticulture and energy production. Largely extracted across Central Europe, the Baltic States and Scandinavia, the sector removes vegetation and drains peatlands in order to extract and dry the peat found below their surface. Peatland restoration is a vital activity due to the ability these ecosystems have to absorb and store carbon, to act as ‘sponges’ for flood waters, and as important biodiversity habitats.
Collaborations with organisations involved in the sector identified the potential for peatland restoration as a necessary step following peat extraction in a landscape. It is intended that this process would create valuable nature-based solutions such as carbon sequestration and flood mitigation to support large-scale peatland recovery aligned with EU Green Deal and Nature Restoration Law goals.
To achieve this vision by 2050, the MERLIN strategy outlines five interlinked actions. First, it highlights the need to build shared knowledge around how peatland restoration can help reduce emissions and boost biodiversity. Second, it emphasises how peatland restoration should be promoted as the primary ‘after-use’ step following peat extraction.
Third, the strategy outlines the need to foster partnerships between landscape authorities and landowners in order to embed peat restoration in their management. Fourth, it highlights the need for policy and regulatory frameworks to prioritise restoration as a key licensing requirement for peat extraction organisations. Finally, it states that clear and viable business incentives must be presented to the sector in order to help boost the uptake of restoration activities.
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Insurance
The insurance sector underpins how individuals and organisations across Europe deal with environmental risks. There are two broad types of insurance: life and non-life. Life insurance focuses on human capital value (e.g. legacy planning, medical costs); whereas non-life insurance covers property, casualty or accident costs, aiming to replace the valuable of things like homes, cars and valuables.
As extreme weather – and resulting floods and droughts – becomes more common under the climate emergency, the demands on both life and non-life insurance are changing to accommodate new risk factors. The MERLIN strategy offers an action plan for 2025–2030 under which the insurance sector integrates nature-based solutions in order to better manage these emerging risks.
Building on engagements with the insurance sector, the strategy focuses on the role of nature-based solutions in non-life insurance, for example through the reductions in flood risks prompted by floodplain restoration. It also considers life insurance investments in nature-based solutions as a means of helping mainstream such approaches through “nature investments” across different sectors.
The strategy identifies a series of key actions required to mainstream nature-based solutions across the investment sector in Europe. These include: the sharing of loss data with all actors, especially regional and local authorities; conducting cost-benefit analyses of nature-based solutions measures; developing standards for evaluating the sustainability of nature-based solutions; encouraging policies to consider nature-based solutions for risk reduction; revisiting insurance portfolios; creating innovative products incorporating nature-based solutions, and; promoting “insurers as investors” in nature-based projects.
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Hydropower
Hydropower is one of the oldest and most widespread sources of renewable energy in Europe, with 21,387 hydropower plants in the EU contributing 13.8% to overall net electricity generation, and with another 8,785 plants currently proposed or under construction. There are around 1.2 million dams, weirs and obstacles in Europe’s rivers, of which hydropower projects account for less than 2%.
However, the sector has a key role to play in European river restoration. Removal of the barriers blocking rivers is a hot topic across Europe: as restorationists seek to connect up fish migration routes and restore natural flow patterns. Following consultation with the hydropower sector, the MERLIN strategy advocates for its role in the barrier removal process across Europe, emphasising the social, economic and biodiversity benefits it offers.
The strategy outlines five strategic actions to better support the involvement of the hydropower sector in this process. First, it highlights the need for better understanding of nature-based solutions – and the benefits they can bring – across the sector. Second, it identifies potential synergies between the hydropower sector’s role in renewable energy policies, their links to nature restoration policies, and how these could be brought together through a nature-based solutions approach to barrier removal.
Third, the strategy focuses on creating clearer financial pathways to involve the hydropower sector in planning, designing and delivering nature-based solutions through barrier removal. Fourth, it outlines the need for better collaboration between public and private bodies to help deliver these projects. Finally, it highlights the need to provide tools to help identify appropriate barriers to be removed and to guide investment decisions.
The strategy authors emphasise the promise of such approaches, but note that fostering trust between different bodies involved in the sector is crucial, due to the adversarial positions taken between some hydropower and nature restoration groups in the past.
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Navigation
Inland navigation along Europe’s vast network of rivers has an important role to play in moving both people and goods across the continent. Large boats typically require deep, consistent navigable channels, known as ‘fairways’. Maintaining these fairways can significantly alter the course, depth and flow of a river, often altering its ecological functioning and the biodiversity habitat it provides.
Inland waterways in Europe are largely managed by public, governmental bodies. The MERLIN strategy highlights the potential to harmonise the drive for zero-emission, sustainable transport with river restoration in Europe. It notes the need for careful trade-offs between navigation and restoration needs, but highlights how recent studies suggest that nature-friendly river engineering – such as bank restoration – does not necessarily hinder navigation.
The strategy argues that the ongoing effects of the climate emergency on Europe’s rivers are common ground for navigation and restoration concerns. It states that increasingly extreme levels of flood and drought require more adaptable vessels, logistics and waterway design that benefit both navigation and nature. To achieve this, high-level policy and management ambitions need to be linked to on-the-ground experience to build trust and confidence in nature-based solutions approaches.
Formed through engagement with the European navigation sector, the MERLIN strategy offers a series of five actions to mainstream its adoption of nature-based solutions. First, it cites the need to develop an action plan to ‘green’ inland waterways on a large scale through nature-based solutions. Second, it highlights the need to build confidence by supporting communities of practice to share knowledge and experiences on the subject.
Third, it suggests that such knowledge sharing can provide a common understanding of the issues facing the European navigation sector, and how nature-based solutions can help address them. Fourth, it emphasises the need to minimise ‘hard’ engineering of Europe’s rivers in the future by promoting nature-based solutions. Finally, it highlights the need for inland waterways to be prioritised based on their ecological status and navigation roles in order to better balance the needs of nature and navigation on Europe’s rivers.
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And finally, to celebrate International Women’s Day at the weekend, the MERLIN communication team put together this video introducing some of the incredible women who make this project special. Enjoy!
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
MERLIN Innovation Awards celebrates cutting-edge approaches to freshwater restoration at 2025 ceremony
The winners of the annual MERLIN Innovation Awards – which highlight state-of-the-art solutions for freshwater restoration – were announced earlier this month.
Entries from organisations across the world were assessed by an expert panel, and shortlists for the two categories – Service of the Year and Product of the Year – were compiled. Two winners were announced at a busy online ceremony on February 13th.
MIA Service of the Year: River Cleanup
The winner of the MIA Service of the Year is River Cleanup, a Belgian non-profit organisation which empowers global communities to cleanup their rivers. The idea behind the project was sparked in 2017, when founder Thomas de Groote was challenged to do a ten minute cleanup of plastic waste in his local area each day for ten days. Thomas dressed up as a superhero, convinced his children to help him, and the idea for River Cleanup was born.
“I can recommend it to everybody: if you ever have that moment, just say yes, because it completely saved my life,” Thomas reflects. “And to me now, it feels that my purpose here on this planet is to do this. It doesn’t feel like a job or a task to do: its just a huge problem, which is almost impossible to solve. But I feel in every vein that that we are going to do it, or at least, we will make a huge contribution to solving it.”
The project grew rapidly, with 10,000 people joining cleanups along the Rhine in 2018, and international growth across ten rivers in Europe and Asia following River Cleanup’s official formation in 2019. The appetite for removing plastic from waterways continued apace, with over two million kilograms of plastic removed from rivers globally in 2022, and work being carried out in one hundred countries by 2023.
“Everybody can be involved,” Thomas explains. “That really stands for the togetherness of people, companies and governments taking action, because often people blame the companies, companies blame the people, and we all say the government needs to do this, and nothing really happens. So that’s why I like to take action and, inspire and motivate everybody, on this planet to become part of the solution. We do it on a very positive, inclusive and impact-driven way.”
River Cleanup has developed a Clean River Model to tackle the root causes of river pollution. The model is based on empowering communities to take action, preventing single-use plastics from reaching waterways, and supporting policy change.
“This model is a highly scalable and holistic approach where it’s not only about cleaning up the river, its about community awareness,” says Thomas. “We go to schools: that’s really our entry point for the community. We look at local leaders so they speak the local language and they’re really from there.
“Then we focus on prevention by reducing single-use plastics and putting in collection systems for post-consumer waste,” Thomas continues. “Cleanup is still important, but it’s also about stopping the plastic getting into the rivers in the first place. And then the last step is accelerate accelerating change, where we work with governments.”
Thomas highlights the role of the MERLIN Innovation Awards and Marketplace in helping bring wider communities together to support river restoration: “It’s amazing to get this prize. It’s another step in getting more people to know who we are, what we do, and how they can contribute. We see our holistic approach as the innovation: we’re bringing people and ideas together and it’s good that it was recognised by the jury members.”
“Our goal is to be working across one thousand rivers across the world, supporting teams working on making their river plastic free,” Thomas says. “And doing that through our platform, where everybody’s contributing and where partners also can find projects and where the whole world is collaborating.
“The dream would be to include everybody who wants to contribute: everyone who can find the energy to help solve these problems,” he continues. “You have to make your plan and then do it and then learn by doing. And on the way, you will you will gain so much experience and you will adapt and then you can finally succeed.”
Product of the Year: Wasser 3.0 PE-X®
The winner of the MIA Product of the Year is Wasser 3.0 for their innovative approach to removing microplastics from water.
“Microplastic pollution is a growing problem,” says Katrin Schuhen, Managing Director of Wasser 3.0. “These tiny particles come from products such as cosmetics and vehicle tyres. They are also shed into the water when we wash polyester clothing and are produced through many types of manufacturing. Contrary to many assumptions, microplastic pollution does not begin in the ocean, it starts on land where products are being produced and used.”
Microplastics – which can originate from tyres, textiles, cosmetics and the breakdown of larger plastic items – are a rapidly growing environmental issue, now found even in the most remote and inaccessible places on Earth, and causing concern for both ecological and human health.
The Wasser 3.0 PE-X® technology provides a modular process for the removal of microplastics from water. Polluted water is run through a mixing tank where microplastics collects in clumps around a special silicone-based chemical compound. These waste clumps can then be reused in house and road construction, and the clean water returned to the environment.
“We are looking for the early adopters, the companies who want to be part of the transformation from now to the future,” Katrin says. “We have industries who are working with us doing the piloting, doing the long-term studies, bringing all the data together, building their sustainability upgraded processes, and becoming future-proof.”
“Responsibility is there on the one hand, and the other is the economic benefit,” she says. “Because if you can build circular processes, you can directly reduce the costs by, for example, re-using processed waters, then the industries become interested in the technology.”
“Winning the MERLIN Innovation Award 2025 for Product of the Year is hopefully an impact accelerator for our microplastic analytics and removal technology,” Katrin explains. “The MIA increases the visibility of the microplastics issue in the environment and links the problem to responsible solutions and products, together with regulations and laws that monitor the entry of microplastics into the environment and measures to prevent it.”
The MERLIN Innovation Awards celebrates new and widely-applicable solutions for restoring freshwater ecosystems. The awards – organised by project partner Connectology – recognise the need for restoration projects to better engage with economic markets to support transformative ecological improvements.
You can find out about the ten shortlisted projects, and the expert jury who selected them.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Introducing FutureLakes: transforming lake restoration in Europe
Europe’s lakes need urgent help. Around half of European lakes fail to reach ‘good’ benchmarks for ecological health and chemical pollution. And as a growing number of studies show, freshwater ecosystems are struggling across the continent, with around a quarter of aquatic species now classified as endangered or ‘near threatened’.
The picture is similar globally: lakes are one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet, subject to the over-abstraction of water, widespread pollution, and the growing impacts of the climate emergency.
Lakes are not only important for the unique plants and animals they support – they’re also vital in underpinning our everyday lives. Widespread algal blooms – caused by pollutants from agriculture and wastewater and exacerbated by warming water temperatures under climate change – threaten water supplies for drinking, washing and recreation.
As a result, the time for ambitious lake restoration is now. The new FutureLakes project responds to this need, aiming to drive forward cutting-edge approaches to help restore Europe’s lakes. A partnership of ten environmental institutions from across Europe, FutureLakes aims to showcase the value of nature-based and circular economy solutions in lake restoration in order to help stimulate more sustainable blue economies.
“We will demonstrate nature-based solutions to reduce pollution loads to lakes and help deliver resilience to floods and droughts,” says NIVA research manager and project coordinator Laurence Carvalho. “We will also pilot circular economy solutions to recover valuable resources from legacy pollutants that have built up in lake sediments.”
“In my view these circular approaches – including harvesting algae – are potentially transformative as they are taking nutrients out of the system and recovering them for re-use in economic sectors, for example in soil conditioner and fertiliser in agriculture or high value products from algae,” Carvalho continues.
“If we can demonstrate it pays to recover valuable resources this can fuel the restoration process. In FutureLakes we aim to demonstrate that restoring lake water quality not only restores freshwater biodiversity, but also makes economic sense,” Carvalho says.
There is a lot of excitement about nature-based solutions in environmental circles right now. The concept is simple: harness the power of natural processes to help protect and restore damaged ecosystems. So, for example, restoring reed beds around a lake can help trap the pollutants that would otherwise run off from surrounding landscape. And as Laurence Carvalho suggests, part of the optimism around nature-based solutions lies in their potential to help stimulate additional economic and societal benefits through ecosystem restoration.
“We will deliver a tested blueprint for lake protection and restoration which will include guidance on how to attract green financing for implementing restoration measures and policy implementation to support the restoration process,” says NIVA researcher and project manager Maeve McGovern. “We will also pilot more innovative and inclusive approaches to water management, including increasing public engagement in citizen science and restoration planning.”
To do this, over the next three years FutureLakes will focus on ten pilot sites and six large demonstration lakes across Europe. Technical innovations such algae harvesting and island creation will be tested at the pilot sites, whilst the potential to integrate such innovative approaches into wider governance and management will be explored at the lake demo sites.
FutureLakes is currently inviting applications from lake managers across Europe to a call for funding to help support their restoration work. The call, which is open until the 31st March 2025, offers over €50,000 in financial assistance to help managers develop action plans to upscale lake restoration in their region. A webinar will be held on the 10th February to guide interested applicants through the process.
FutureLakes is funded by the European Union under a wider ‘Mission to Restore our Ocean and Waters’. This EU Mission aims to protect and restore the health of our oceans and inland waters through research and innovation, citizen engagement and blue investments.
You can find out more about FutureLakes on their project website, and keep updated with progress in articles and podcasts here over the coming years.
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This article was supported by the FutureLakes project.
MERLIN Podcast EP.10 – Restoring Europe’s landscapes through the Green Deal and Nature Restoration Law
In the new episode of the MERLIN podcast we take a behind the scenes look at environmental restoration in Europe on the cusp of what will likely prove to be a transformative year.
First, we find out about the EU’s big environmental policy, the Green Deal, then about the ambitious new Nature Restoration Law adopted last year. We then hear from four EU restoration projects about the challenges of planning, financing and carrying out restoration on freshwaters, forests, wetlands and coastlines across the continent.
Podcast host Rob St John speaks to Colombe Warin from the European Commission, Shane McGuinness from WaterLANDS, Agustín Sánchez-Arcilla from REST-COAST, Elisabeth Schatzdorfer from SUPERB and Sebastian Birk from MERLIN to get the inside story on restoring Europe’s landscapes.
Four key themes emerge around contemporary restoration in Europe: the use of nature-based solutions; the importance of bringing communities and stakeholders together; the challenges of financing ambitious restoration projects; and the need to upscale restoration activities from individual sites to entire landscapes and watersheds.
You can also listen and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Podcasts. Stay tuned for the next episode soon!
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Top posts of 2024
In these early days of 2025 we continue our annual tradition of looking back at our top posts from the previous year.
Freshwater issues were at the heart of many of the big environmental issues of 2024. In Europe, the need for ambitious ecological restoration was enshrined in policy through the adoption of the EU Nature Restoration Law. Across the continent, the effects of extreme floods and droughts were increasingly felt, signalling the urgent need for environmental restoration to help support the lives of both people and nature.
2024 also saw the ongoing rise of nature-based solutions to help tackle such major issues. Nature-based solutions – which harness the potential of natural processes in environmental management – are increasingly being used across river, stream, lake and peatland restoration, both in Europe and globally.
The EU MERLIN project was a hive of activity, as its learning Academy and Marketplace were launched, alongside a raft of policy briefings and reports. Our MERLIN podcast featured a range of ‘behind the scenes’ glimpses into this work to help bring Europe’s freshwaters back to life, including stream restoration in Portugal and the restoration of the Danube River in Austria.
And now looking forward to 2025, we want to say a big thank you to you, our readers and listeners, for your eyes and ears. We appreciate your support, and are always happy to hear your thoughts and ideas, whether by email or on our social media platforms.
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Can European agriculture be economically viable and environmentally friendly? (February)
The relationship between agriculture and the environment is a hot topic in Europe right now. In recent months farmers across the continent have been protesting to highlight a system they see as increasingly unprofitable and burdened by EU rules aimed at making the bloc climate-neutral by 2050. Farmers have organised motorway and city blockades in tractors across Greece, Germany, Portugal, Poland and France, and last week pelted the European Parliament in Brussels with eggs.
A new study explores how the impacts of different agricultural approaches across Europe affect the ecological health of rivers and streams across the continent. A research team led by Dr. Christian Schürings from UDE in Germany analysed data on agricultural land use across 27 European countries. Writing in Water Research, the researchers then linked this analysis to data on the ecological status of flowing waters across the continent, from small streams to huge rivers like the Ruhr and Rhine. (read more)
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Can the EU Nature Restoration Law help make Europe’s rivers flow more freely? (March)
After months of debate and revisions the EU Nature Restoration Law was approved by the European Parliament in late February. The law represents an ambitious step towards restoring Europe’s depleted ecosystems, requiring EU countries to restore at least 20% of their land and sea by 2030, and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050.
The EU Nature Restoration Law is a significant response to the fact that over 80% of European habitats are in poor condition and in need of restoration. Moreover, it foregrounds the vital roles that nature plays in supporting our lives, whether through food security, flood protection or water supplies. On a continent increasingly stressed by the effects of the climate emergency and economic crisis, it offers a hopeful vision of fostering more sustainable and resilient societies and economies in the future. (read more)
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Ringing the doorbell to help fish migration in the Netherlands (April)
It’s well known that barriers to fish migration are a major issue in rivers across Europe. An innovative scheme in the Netherlands has harnessed the power of online citizen scientists to alert ecologists in Utrecht when fish are congregating behind a boat lock between the rivers Kromme Rhine and Vecht.
Visitors to the ‘fish doorbell’ website can then press a button to tell the lock keeper to open the gate to allow the fish through. This scheme – which allows fish such as carp, bream and eels to move upstream and avoid predators such as grebes and cormorants – has been extremely popular, with over a million visitors this year alone. (read more)
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Global migratory fish populations have declined by 81% since 1970: but river restoration projects offer hope (May)
Global migratory fish populations have declined by 81% since 1970, according to a major new report released last week. This startling decline has been documented in freshwaters across the world, with particular severity in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The new Living Planet Index for Migratory Freshwater Fishes states that the downward trend in migratory fish populations represents an annual decline of 3.3%, and is largely the result of habitat degradation and loss coupled with human over-exploitation. The report cites that a key driver of migratory fish declines is the fragmentation of rivers and the blockage of migration routes due to dams, weirs and other barriers. (read more)
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The MERLIN Academy: a new open-access learning and resources hub for freshwater restoration (July)
The EU MERLIN project has launched its new online Academy, a hub for cutting-edge learning, resources, webinars and podcasts around freshwater restoration. The open-access Academy is designed to help support practitioners, students and policy makers in mainstreaming freshwater restoration, both in Europe and globally.
Visitors to the MERLIN Academy can sign up to a series of Learning Modules for free. The first public Module covers the economics and financing of freshwater restoration in a series of videos featuring experts on the topic, along with a series of worksheets and quizzes. (read more)
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Making the Seine swimmable for the Paris Olympics (August)
This summer’s Olympic Games in Paris saw swimmers compete in the River Seine, a waterway that had been closed to public bathers for more than a century due to high levels of water pollution.
The Seine, which flows 481 miles from Burgundy to the sea in Normandy, has long defined the architecture and culture of Paris. However, before this summer, centuries of domestic and industrial wastewater coupled with Paris’s complex and antiquated sewage system had made the river highly polluted and unsafe to swim in. (read more)
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Restoring Europe’s landscapes to tackle the effects of the climate emergency (September)
Devastating flooding has killed at least 24 people as more than five times the average monthly rainfall for September has fallen across Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia in the past week. At the same time, the Portuguese government has declared a ‘state of calamity’ as wildfires have torn through forests across the north of the country.
Through these floods and wildfires, we are witnessing the effects of the climate emergency in action. “Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly. This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future,” the EU’s crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarčič told MEPs last week. “Europe is the fastest warming continent globally and is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events.” (read more)
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MERLIN Podcast EP.9 – Why community matters to freshwater restoration (October)
It’s increasingly recognised that restoring damaged ecosystems is not only about improving habitats for wildlife, it is also vital to consider the needs of the people who live and work in a restoration landscape.
In the new episode of the MERLIN podcast we hear stories about how community has been placed at the heart of freshwater restoration projects. We hear from Tal Marciano Ratner about how the restoration of the Tzipori watershed in Israel offers a meeting place for people from different religions and ethnicities to come together in a time of great unrest and conflict.
Ruben Rocha from Dam Removal Europe talks about the challenges of communicating the benefits of dam removal to local communities, and describes how he is beginning to see the demand for removal projects coming from communities themselves. Roland Bischof and Julia von Gönner from iDiv in Germany tell us about the innovative citizen science work in the FLOW project, where the public can help scientists generate valuable data about the health of their streams.
Robert Arlinghaus from IGB and Humboldt University in Germany describes his long-standing work with angling communities, outlining how a productive form of aquatic stewardship can emerge from their interactions with nature. Finally, María Sánchez from ECOLISE outlines how community-led initiatives across Europe are helping give people a stronger voice in shaping environmental restoration.
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Notes from the water’s edge: how MERLIN is helping bring Europe’s freshwaters back to life (November)
Plans for environmental restoration are gathering pace across Europe as we move closer to the adoption of the EU Nature Restoration Law. This planning is supported by four major European projects which aim to develop new approaches to help restore the continent’s freshwaters, forests, wetlands and coastlines.
These four projects – MERLIN, SUPERB, WaterLANDS and REST-COAST – were funded by the EU’s big environmental policy, the Green Deal. As they all have around a year left to run, the four projects are rapidly producing guidance, tools and support to help environmental managers bring Europe’s environments back to life. (read more)
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Signalling the path towards healthy freshwaters in Europe (December)
Europe’s freshwaters are under increasing pressure from human activities. For centuries, rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands across the continent have been altered, abstracted and polluted. And as floods and droughts across Europe intensify, we are seeing the real-time effects of climate change directly impacting both our freshwaters and our everyday lives.
In recent years there has been a groundswell of activity promoting freshwater conservation and restoration across the continent. Large EU projects like MERLIN and WaterLANDS are rigorously testing the potential of so-called ‘nature-based solutions’ to help restore rivers, streams and wetlands.
These topics are at the heart of a new report by the European Environment Agency (EEA). In Signals 2024, the EEA state that despite ongoing attempts to safeguard European freshwaters, urgent action is needed to safeguard water security and build resilience to every-growing pressures. (read more)
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You can read all our 2024 articles here – happy 2025!
This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
MERLIN Academy launches free course on freshwater restoration
The EU MERLIN project has today launched a new, open-access learning module on implementing freshwater restoration. Across 62 lessons, the module – hosted on the MERLIN Academy – guides visitors through the policy, management and assessment of the restoration of rivers, lakes and wetlands.
The new learning module includes a range of fact-sheets, videos and quizzes produced by leading restoration scientists. It begins by introducing the key policies – including the EU Green Deal and Nature Restoration Law – that structure and guide restoration efforts in Europe. Central to this theme is the idea of using natural processes to implement restoration projects – a set of approaches known as nature-based solutions.
The module continues by outlining the key concepts – such as River Basin Management and Regional Scalability planning – which underpin how freshwater restoration is planned and implemented. A vital component of this theme is the challenge of ‘scaling up’ restoration from individual sites to whole river basins.
“MERLIN learns a lot from close collaboration with restoration cases on the ground,” says MERLIN coordinator Dr Sebastian Birk from UDE in Germany. “These experiences have shaped the design of the Academy, resulting in knowledge that is robust and actionable.”
This learning theme leads into a series of resources around designing and implementing effective restoration monitoring programs which can track the progress of a restoration project. This is an important process, not only for monitoring how nature recovery is taking place, but also tracking the benefits it produces to people.
This feeds into the final theme of the new learning module, which offers resources to help users assess the impacts of restoration on both people and nature. In particular, this theme highlights environmental criteria such as biodiversity, free-flowing rivers and climate resilience which are designated by European policies.
“Nature restoration is not just about biodiversity benefits,” says module coordinator Dr Laurence Carvalho from NIVA in Norway. “This module provides you with the knowledge to measure the co-benefits, and trade-offs, for society and the economy.”
The MERLIN Academy offers free, cutting-edge learning resources to help support and train new generations of restoration managers and scientists. The new module follows another released earlier this year which explores the economics and financing of freshwater restoration.
The MERLIN Academy instructors are experts with deep experience of freshwater ecology, restoration, nature-based solutions, policy and economics. Drawn from academic institutions, NGOs and private companies, their expertise is offered freely as a means of supporting positive change through freshwater restoration, both in Europe and globally.
“Something I really appreciate is that this tool is freely accessible, which makes education and the MERLIN knowledge inclusive for any person with an internet connection,” says Joselyn Arreaga Espin, developer of the MERLIN Academy.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Signalling the path towards healthy freshwaters in Europe
Europe’s freshwaters are under increasing pressure from human activities. For centuries, rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands across the continent have been altered, abstracted and polluted. And as floods and droughts across Europe intensify, we are seeing the real-time effects of climate change directly impacting both our freshwaters and our everyday lives.
In recent years there has been a groundswell of activity promoting freshwater conservation and restoration across the continent. Large EU projects like MERLIN and WaterLANDS are rigorously testing the potential of so-called ‘nature-based solutions’ to help restore rivers, streams and wetlands.
These schemes – which harness the power of natural process – aim to highlight how healthy freshwaters are not only vital habitats for a dizzying range of biodiversity, but also the vital scaffolding to sustainable and prosperous human societies.
These topics are at the heart of a new report by the European Environment Agency (EEA). In Signals 2024, the EEA state that despite ongoing attempts to safeguard European freshwaters, urgent action is needed to safeguard water security and build resilience to every-growing pressures.
“Climate change is making water management more challenging than ever. Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and extreme weather events are putting unprecedented pressure on water resources,” says Leena Ylä-Mononen, the EEA Executive Director.
“Water stress already affects 30% of Europe’s population each year, a trend that is set to worsen as climate change intensifies. Across Europe, shifting rainfall patterns have led to both more frequent droughts and more intense rainfall events and floods,” Ylä-Mononen continues.
These trends are evident in this year’s EEA assessment of Europe’s water bodies. The study shows that as of 2021, only 37% of Europe’s surface waters achieved ‘good ecological status’ whilst just 29% met ‘good chemical status’.
Ongoing agricultural and industrial pollution into freshwaters creates ‘cocktails’ of pressures on freshwaters increasingly impacted by climate change. As the figures show, this means that around two-thirds of European freshwaters are in unfavourable condition.
“Our existing systems are poorly adapted to cope with these rapid changes, threatening both water security and the health of people and nature,” Leena Ylä-Mononen continues. “As weather extremes become more common, our management of water must adapt too. We need decisive action to protect communities and preserve the health of our natural environments.
“To improve resilience, we must focus on reducing water use and enhancing efficiency. This includes cutting water leakage, investing in water-efficient technologies, and increasing water reuse. In addition, expanding the use of nature-based solutions, such as restoring wetlands and increasing green infrastructure, can improve water retention, reduce flood risks, and restore biodiversity,” Ylä-Mononen states.
The report highlights the need for better data and monitoring systems which offer real-time information on water quality and quantity to allow better decisions to be made about managing freshwater systems. This is particularly the case when negotiating water use with other stakeholders from agriculture and industry.
In this spirit, the report emphasises that building water resilience is a shared responsibility, requiring open collaborations between policy makers, scientists, industry and citizens to help reduce water consumption, reduce pollution and restore freshwater ecoystems.
The report features four key articles on water management in Europe. The first highlights the pressing need to restore European freshwaters to protect their rapidly dwindling biodiversity. The second explores why water pollution persists across the continent despite decades of action to curb it.
The third highlights how climate change poses increasing risks to water quality and freshwater supplies for people and nature across the continent, and how there is an urgent need to build resilience into our freshwater systems. The final article offers a good news story: highlighting how – thanks to effective environmental management – 96% of designated European bathing waters now meet safety standards.
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Read EEA Signals 2024 – Towards healthy and resilient waters in Europe
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Notes from the water’s edge: how MERLIN is helping bring Europe’s freshwaters back to life
Plans for environmental restoration are gathering pace across Europe as we move closer to the adoption of the EU Nature Restoration Law. This planning is supported by four major European projects which aim to develop new approaches to help restore the continent’s freshwaters, forests, wetlands and coastlines.
These four projects – MERLIN, SUPERB, WaterLANDS and REST-COAST – were funded by the EU’s big environmental policy, the Green Deal. As they all have around a year left to run, the four projects are rapidly producing guidance, tools and support to help environmental managers bring Europe’s environments back to life.
The four Green Deal projects will present their work at an EU webinar next month – sign up here.
MERLIN Academy and Innovation Awards
MERLIN has been particularly busy in recent months. The latest newsletter showcases the breadth of work taking place across the project, including the developments of the MERLIN Academy, an online platform which aims to support practitioners, students, and policymakers in implementing effective restoration projects.
The MERLIN Academy – which consists of free online modules covering both theoretical and practical themes around freshwater restoration – is now looking for people to help shape its future. An online survey is available for the rest of the month, asking how the Academy can be better tailored to meet the needs of those implementing the Nature Restoration Law. You can access it here.
The annual MERLIN Innovation Awards are now open for submissions. The awards celebrate the products and services which are making ground-breaking contributions to global freshwater restoration. You can read about the past winners here, and make your entry by 13th December 2024 here.
Exploring case studies and deliverables
MERLIN’s work is based on the experiences and findings from 18 restoration case studies across Europe, from large rivers to tiny streams; from urban wetlands to remote peatlands. Stories and data from these amazing places can now be explored through the Case Study portal.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the MERLIN podcast, you can explore all our episodes here. The latest episode, released earlier this month, focuses on the crucial role of communities in driving positive change. From Israel to Germany, we learn how diverse groups of people are coming together to restore their local waterways.
A key part of big projects like MERLIN is publishing so-called ‘deliverables’, which provide cutting-edge information to policy makers, environmental managers and scientists to help share new findings. Four new deliverable reports have been published this autumn, covering topics including just transformations in implementing nature-based solutions, economic value analysis, and how to ‘upscale’ restoration from small sites to entire landscapes. You can read them all here.
Simulating ‘digital twins’ of real-world environments
One particularly fascinating deliverable covers the stories from the four ‘digital twin’ case studies in MERLIN. Digital twins are dynamic, virtual copies of real-world systems. Essentially, they are computer models of real environments which look and behave like a natural system.
Following the boom in ‘big data’, digital twins have become increasingly popular in replicating complex human-made systems like aircrafts and buildings. In so doing, they allow designers to predict their behaviour under different scenarios.
The MERLIN scientists saw significant potential for this approach to be applied to freshwater restoration. As we well know, freshwaters are hugely complex systems which change over seasons and years, and are vulnerable to human-made pressures. Being able to better predict their dynamics over long timescales is thus a valuable opportunity for environmental managers and policy makers seeking to mainstream their restoration.
In an engaging ‘StoryMap’, the MERLIN team lead viewers through four key elements of digital twinning: big data, computer modelling, supporting decision making, and boosting wider engagement. You can explore the world of digital twinning here.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
It’s increasingly recognised that restoring damaged ecosystems is not only about improving habitats for wildlife, it is also vital to consider the needs of the people who live and work in a restoration landscape.
In the new episode of the MERLIN podcast we hear stories about how community has been placed at the heart of freshwater restoration projects. We hear from Tal Marciano Ratner about how the restoration of the Tzipori watershed in Israel offers a meeting place for people from different religions and ethnicities to come together in a time of great unrest and conflict.
Ruben Rocha from Dam Removal Europe talks about the challenges of communicating the benefits of dam removal to local communities, and describes how he is beginning to see the demand for removal projects coming from communities themselves. Roland Bischof and Julia von Gönner from iDiv in Germany tell us about the innovative citizen science work in the FLOW project, where the public can help scientists generate valuable data about the health of their streams.
Robert Arlinghaus from IGB and Humboldt University in Germany describes his long-standing work with angling communities, outlining how a productive form of aquatic stewardship can emerge from their interactions with nature. Finally, María Sánchez from ECOLISE outlines how community-led initiatives across Europe are helping give people a stronger voice in shaping environmental restoration.
You can also listen and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Podcasts. Stay tuned for the next episode soon!
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
2023 was the driest year for global rivers in 33 years, according to a major new report released this week. The World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) State of Global Water Resources 2023 report highlights the severe stresses on global water supplies, starkly indicated by five consecutive years of below-normal river flows across the world.
The report draws from global meteorological and hydrological data to offer a planetary assessment of water resources. It highlights that 2023 was the hottest year on record, with widespread floods and prolonged droughts globally, driven by the ongoing climate emergency, which has made the global water cycle more erratic and extreme.
Melting glaciers suffered the largest loss of ice mass ever recorded over the last five decades. 2023 is the second consecutive year in which all regions of the world with glaciers recorded ice loss.
“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” says WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action.”
The report illustrates that global rivers are being significantly affected by the effects of the climate emergency. Over half of global river catchments had abnormal conditions in 2023, with most of them running at lower levels than normal.
Large areas of Northern, Central and South America experienced severe droughts in 2023, as the Mississippi and Amazon basins suffered record low water levels. Similarly, the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong basins experienced lower than normal water level conditions.
Other areas were deluged with rain and flooding. The East coast of Africa, North Island of New Zealand and the Philippines experienced regular river flooding, as did the UK, Ireland and Finland in Europe.
“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated,” Saulo continues. “It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions.”
The trend of widespread low river levels translated into lower inflows into reservoirs across the world, particularly across India, Northern, South and Central America and parts of Australia. For example, low water levels in Lake Coari in the Amazon led to extreme peaks in water temperatures, with negative effects for its biodiversity.
However, the report highlights that water management approaches heavily influence reservoir inflows, as areas of the Amazon and Parana kept water levels topped up despite low river flows.
Glaciers across the world lost more than 600 gigatonnes of water in 2023, largely due to extreme melting across western North America and the European Alps. Snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere has been decreasing in spring and summer, reflecting a cold season shortened by climate change.
“And yet, far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources,” Saulo adds. “We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments. This is urgently needed.”
The report highlights the significant changes happening to the global water cycle as a result of the climate emergency. As a result it has important implications for freshwater managers across the world seeking to conserve and restore their ecosystems under increasingly erratic and extreme conditions.
Water supplies are also vital for human health and equitable development. However, 3.6 billion people currently experience inadequate access to water for at least one month a year, according to UN Water. This figure is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050.
As Celeste Saulo argues, there is a need for better monitoring and assessment of global freshwaters in order to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. The report cites the United Nations’ Early Warnings for All and Operational Global Water Information System as valuable tools for this task to help inform better freshwater planning and policy making.
The Freshwater Blog 