Restoring Europe’s landscapes to tackle the effects of the climate emergency
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.”
In the same debate, Terry Reintke, co-president of the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament, highlighted the need for an ambitious Green Deal to continue to reduce emissions to fight climate change across the continent. Allied to this, Reintke emphasised the need to invest in nature restoration programmes to mitigate the effects of climate change, and to further build solidarity between member states to work together on delivering restoration.
A few weeks before, environmentalists from across Europe met in Estonia to tackle the issues highlighted by Reintke. A key session at the European Conference on Ecological Restoration addressed strategies for restoring Europe’s ecosystems at a landscape scale under the EU Green Deal.
Historically, ecosystem restoration has been largely split into approaches that focus on individual ecosystem types: rivers, forests, wetlands, urban green spaces, and so on. Despite the growing agreement for the need for ambitious restoration across Europe to tackle the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, this ‘siloing’ of approaches is still dominant.
The discussions brought together representatives from each of the EU Green Deal restoration projects, the Endangered Landscape and Seascape Programme, the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre and other institutions focused on restoration.
Together, they asked the question: what knowledge is needed to effectively restore entire landscapes across Europe? Given the recent adoption of the Nature Restoration Law, and the growing awareness of the need for nature-based solutions to tackle the climate crisis, these discussions are timely and vital.
MERLIN project co-ordinator Sebastian Birk took part in the discussions, and helped to convey four key themes for fostering landscape-scale restoration in Europe. “The session highlighted the complexities and challenges of working at a landscape scale,” Birk reflects, “but it also presented several opportunities.”
Bringing people into the conversation
First, Sebastian stresses the importance of stakeholder engagement and co-produced solutions in designing and carrying out restoration programmes. This means understanding local people, conflicts and cultures in restoration landscapes, and finding effective communication strategies to foster engagement and participatory governance.
In short, it’s important to remember that people are an inherent part of nature restoration, and their voices and perspectives need to be heard in its implementation. Across wide areas, it is likely that these perspectives will be diverse, and so creating spaces for conversation and conflict resolution are critical.
The complexities of restoring entire landscapes
Second, Sebastian emphasises the complexities of implementing and monitoring restoration projects across entire landscapes. Here, restoration planning must content with complex land tenures and boundaries, different government ministries, and data gaps in the condition of habitats. Moreover, there is the need to consider restoration as a long-term process, which can need adaptive planning and management over time.
So a key challenge is to bring diverse stakeholders together across wide areas to cooperate on long-term plans for restoration. The session highlighted the potential for better cooperation between bottom-up (e.g. community groups) and top-down (e.g. EU legislation) stakeholders, and the opportunities offered by creative engagement techniques to bring these groups on board.
In addition, the session highlighted the value of adaptive pilot projects which show the value of restoration to different communities, and allow environmental managers to make adjustments based on monitoring results.
Finding new funds to finance restoration
Third, Sebastian identifies the key theme of financing restoration. For ambitious restoration projects to be successful, there is a need for significant funding to support them. Here, the discussions highlighted the need for more public-private partnerships in raising long-term, stable funding. The need for better communication of the value of restoration – for example through demonstration sites and multimedia content – is identified as vital in fostering these partnerships.
Participants at the meeting discussed the value of aggregator organisations which can help pool smaller-scale funding into larger, more impactful and consistent funds for restoration. Similarly, they identified the need for ‘matchmaker’ services which can help bring together restoration organisations with fundraising and investor engagement.
Promoting nature-positive economies in restoration landscapes
Finally, Sebastian highlights the relationship between landscape restoration and local economies. Here, discussions focused on the need to help foster nature-positive economic opportunities – such as eco-tourism or sustainable farming – in restoration landscapes. There is the potential to help promote markets for such restoration economies, for example by helping producers scale their production and gain access to markets across the continent.
“By integrating local communities and mainstreaming nature-positive businesses,” Birk concludes, “these strategies can help overcome barriers and foster long-term success in landscape restoration efforts.”
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Online marketplaces create new routes for the spread of invasive crayfish species
Growing global networks of online trade are creating new pathways for invasive crayfish species to spread across Europe, a new study has found. Freshwater crayfish are popular pets amongst aquarium hobbyists, but their release into rivers and lakes can cause significant damage to the health and functioning of ecosystems.
Writing in Conservation Biology, Julian D. Olden and Francisco A.C. Carvalho highlight how national biosecurity measures which tackle such invasive alien species widely struggle to keep pace with the growth of online platforms for buying and selling exotic species. This ‘clicks-not-bricks’ transition away from physical retail outlets has created opportunities for new long-distance trade routes for live organisms, and in so doing increased the potential for the spread of invasive species.
The authors’ study provides the first global assessment of the online trade in ornamental crayfish. “By systematically examining e-commerce marketplaces in multiple languages, we show that the online global crayfish pet trade involves hundreds of online marketplaces and thousands of sale listings in thirty-three countries across five continents, involving sixty different species and representing a selling value of around US$1.5 million,” explains Professor Olden. “We found that close to half of the listings were selling species considered globally invasive, and we subsequently map the geography of invasion risk across the world.”
One species highlighted by the study is the marbled crayfish. This remarkable creature – Procambarus virginalis – did not exist three decades ago. The original marbled crayfish was born in a German pet shop to a male and female slough crayfish, but had an additional set of chromosomes. This mutation gave the marbled crayfish the extraordinary ability to reproduce without a mate, leading to a population which now consists entirely of females. The species is highly prized by aquarium owners, not least for its diversity of colouration: individuals raised alone in captivity are blue, whilst those raised with others tend to be more grey.
Now found in waterways across Germany, the rapidly-reproducing marbled crayfish can outcompete native crayfish species for habitat, and help spread a fungal disease often called the “crayfish plague”. Despite the European Union instituting a total ban of the possession and trade of the marbled crayfish in the wild, the authors found the species widely available online to be shipped to Europe. They highlight research which suggests that the spread of the marbled crayfish across Europe is entirely driven by demand from the aquarium trade, increasingly facilitated by online trade.
Olden and Carvalho’s study – part of a wider special issue on the global wildlife trade – prompts significant questions for the conservation and restoration of Europe’s freshwaters. In particular, it highlights the need for joined-up policy decisions to monitor and regulate the online trade of invasive species across borders. The authors demonstrate that whilst the EU has a strategic coordinated joint plan across all Member States to reduce the availability of high-risk invasive species, two of the prohibited species (red swamp crayfish and marbled crayfish) are widely available in European-based online marketplaces.
“Importantly the internet is not purely the cause of the problem; rather it also offers solutions that help prevent trade-related invasions of crayfish,” states Professor Olden. “Internet public forums and discussion groups provide opportunities for regulators to track consumer preferences, including through surveying popular social media platforms. The internet may also lend insight into how often and where illegal dumping of aquarium animals occurs, such as through the monitoring of online video postings.”
“Early warning systems can leverage the massive amounts of data on the Internet to support real-time surveillance of online marketplaces to detect new non-native species in trade, Olden continues. “Internal retailers represent the major, and perhaps the only, point of contact between the supply chain and the hobbyist. Online marketplaces are uniquely positioned to influence and educate ornamental owners about what to do with unwanted aquarium organisms, although forging these new relationships to increase awareness of the risks associated with invasive species remains uncommon.”
“Our work illustrates how continued growth in international trade and the burgeoning transition from brick-and-mortar stores to online marketplaces to purchase pets may necessitate a paradigm shift in the way in which nations seek to safeguard their borders against alien invasive species, both today and in the future,” Olden concludes.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Freshwater restoration is growing in popularity across Europe, increasingly backed by better scientific knowledge, practical experience and political support. However, as work in the EU MERLIN project shows, there is still a need to demonstrate how successful restoration can be mainstreamed across the continent.
A new survey aims to help advance freshwater restoration in Europe by identifying the factors that make restoration projects successful. The EcoAdvance project – funded by the EU Horizon scheme – has designed the survey to gather the perspectives of freshwater scientists, academics, managers, community organisers and policy makers across Europe.
The results of the survey will contribute to a tool which supports freshwater restoration projects by showcasing best-practice examples and case studies, at both continental and national scales. This work is extremely timely given the adoption of the EU Nature Restoration Law – and its commitment to restoring 25,000km of free flowing rivers across Europe – earlier this year.
“Success inspires success, and when you hear these people, when you see the varieties of paths they followed to be successful, when you read their insights into how to deal with barriers, it is nothing short of inspiring,” says EcoAdvance partner Phyllis Posy. “You understand that Europe really has the people and resilience to achieve the Green Deal.”
“The survey will help us understand country differences – the diversity of stressors and climates – and what factors make restoration projects prone to success,” adds EcoAdvance coordinator Mark Morris. “This includes the tools people use to adapt to specific technical and social challenges that could derail a project.”
For EcoAdvance partners Helmut Habersack – voted the Austrian of the Year in Research 2023 for his work on river restoration – the work is important to help bring people together, recalling years when “engineers and ecologists were colliding, and no one could go forward.” Habersack explains: “there is only one river – and we have no choice but to come to the table and work together.”
The EcoAdvance survey is open until 10th September and can be completed here.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Making the Seine swimmable for the Paris Olympics
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.
When Paris won their Olympic bid in 2016, Anne Hidalgo – the city’s current mayor – promised that athletes would be able to safely swim in the Seine during the 2024 Games, as they did when Paris first hosted the Olympics in 1900. City authorities hope that the Games will revive public swimming in the Seine, and 26 new swimming pools – walled off from heavy boat traffic – are due to be opened along the river in Paris.
Over the last eight years, significant investments into reducing the amount of untreated wastewater reaching the Seine have been made. Ahead of this summer’s Olympics, French authorities invested around €1.4 billion in measures across the Seine basin, including a giant stormwater storage tank in Paris. The tank – which has a capacity equivalent to 20 Olympic-sized pools – is designed to store untreated wastewater during heavy rain storms, and prevent it from directly entering the Seine.
The water is then slowly released back into the sewer system and treated downstream in the city’s sewage-treatment plants, before being released back into the river. The storage tank system is accompanied by disinfection systems to treat sewage more effectively and the redirection of wastewater from more than 10,000 homes and houseboats that used to dump directly into the Seine. Together, this work has resulted in untreated wastewater levels reaching the Seine being 90% lower in 2022 than 2002.
In July, shortly before the Olympics started, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo donned goggles and a wetsuit to swim in the Seine in central Paris, accompanied by swimmers from local clubs. However, heavy rain at the start of the Games caused concerns over water quality in the river, and multiple training swims were cancelled as a result.
The organisers carried out daily water quality tests for the fecal bacteria E. coli and enterococci – which can lead to sickness and diarrhoea if ingested – in the Seine. These tests allowed both triathlon and marathon swimming events to go ahead in river water which was deemed ‘good quality’ by international standards. Under World Triathlon guidelines, E. coli levels up to 1,000 colony-forming units per 100 milliliters can be considered ‘good’ enough for competitions to take place.
Urban swimming: a growing trend
The initiatives in Paris are part of a wider movement, with urban swimming steadily growing in popularity in many European cities – including Copenhagen and Zurich – in recent years. There are now ongoing efforts to make Berlin’s Spree canal and Amsterdam’s canals swimmable for the public.
Urban swimming brings many benefits to the wider city. Plainly, it requires clean waterways where pollution levels have been limited. In many cases, this is both good for people, and the aquatic ecosystem too. For example, clean-up efforts in the Seine have increased the number of fish species inhabiting urban Paris from three in the 1970s to more than thirty now.
Many urban waterways have been polluted for decades by overflows of sewage from combined sewer overflows, or CSO’s as they’re often known. During periods of heavy rainfall, these underground sewers are designed to overflow directly into urban waters, carrying with them cocktails of pollutants, bacteria and microplastics.
One powerful solution is to turn to nature to reduce the amount of polluted water reaching sewer systems. The ‘sponge city’ concept – in which green urban architecture helps absorb and slow the flows of water through the city – is rapidly growing across the world. Originally coined in China in the early 2000s, the sponge city model emphasises green infrastructure such as urban parks, wetlands, tree planting, green roofs, permeable paving and rainwater reuse to help alleviate flooding and pollution.
These different nature-based solutions are brought together in cities to form sustainable urban drainage systems (or SuDs), which harness natural processes to filter pollutants and buffer floodwaters. Many of these approaches also help create valuable biodiversity habitat to boost the health of urban ecosystems, and their resilience to the ongoing heat effects of the climate emergency.
Paris’s success in making the Seine swimmable for the Olympics this summer provides a beacon of hope for our urban rivers. Despite the multitude of challenges the clean-up operation has faced, it shows that even the most polluted urban rivers can be made safe for people to swim and bathe, and boost the health of the wider aquatic ecosystem in cities.
Allan Water restoration project wins major Scottish award
The Forth Rivers Trust has won the Climate Impact award at the recent Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCOV) Scottish Charity Awards 2024 for their work in restoring the Allan Water in Central Scotland.
The Trust, supported by the MERLIN project and other funders, has been working with land managers and communities for the past eight years to restore degraded habitats along the Allan Water.
The Trust have implemented a range of nature-based solutions to help build resilience to ongoing climate changes along the catchment. These include measures to slow water flows to help buffer flooding, riparian tree planting to help keep the river cool under increasing air temperatures, restoring degraded peatland to lock in carbon, and creating new wetlands to help boost wading bird populations.
“This award is testament to the collective efforts and hard work of our staff, land managers, partners, contractors and steering group It underscores our shared commitment to delivering a resilient catchment for future generations,” said Charlotte Neary from the Forth Rivers Trust.
“The project wouldn’t be possible without the support of our funders, including The Scottish Government, European Union via the MERLIN Project, Nature Scot Nature Restoration Fund and Network Rail,” Neary continued.
“Recognition of the project through winning this award has given us even more momentum to carry on developing and delivering work on the Allan Water in the future. We extend our heartfelt thanks to each and every one who has been a part of this journey, supporting the project in various ways. Your contributions have been instrumental in its success,” Neary said.
You can find out more about the Allan Water restoration project through the MERLIN factsheets, and on our most recent podcast, which features an interview with Charlotte Neary.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
Restoring damaged and depleted ecosystems in Europe is a hot topic right now, following the adoption of the Nature Restoration Law earlier this summer. As awareness of the need for ambitious nature restoration projects grows across the continent, so too does the recognition of their links to economic prosperity and human well-being.
The new MERLIN Marketplace is designed to support the growing need for cutting-edge solutions and services which help mainstream nature restoration. It connects the suppliers of tools which support restoration with audiences of environmental managers, community groups and policy makers.
Whilst the Marketplace is continually growing, it already hosts an array of innovative products and services for freshwater restoration. These include river barriers to manage plastic pollution, AI tools to support sustainable irrigation schemes, ‘egg boxes’ for introducing fish eggs into rivers, and real-time water quality monitoring systems, amongst many others.
The featured products and services aren’t limited to freshwaters, though. They also include satellite-powered systems for tracking carbon footprints, AI systems which support forest conservation, agroecology consultants, and 3D mapping systems to help visualise restoration projects.
The Marketplace is a key resource for helping advance the MERLIN philosophy that effective restoration requires the transformation of our societies towards more sustainable models. Through promoting these products and services, the goal is to help mainstream their use in everyday life, economies and environmental projects across Europe.
Central to this ambition is linking the suppliers of these products and services with their users, as MERLIN coordinator Sebastian Birk explains, “For effective implementation on-site, we need experts who guarantee trustworthy and professional realisation of their products and services. The MERLIN Marketplace is developing into the perfect platform for this matchmaking.”
The MERLIN Marketplace has been developed through two partner organisations: OPPLA and Connectology. “We are excited to witness the extensive variety of products and services now available on the platform,” says a Connectology representative. “We are particularly enthusiastic about welcoming financial institutions to support our restoration sites and scientific partners to register their cutting-edge solutions and services on the Marketplace.
“We are confident that this advanced platform will enable us to engage with a broader spectrum of companies dedicated to developing nature-based solutions for our shared objective of restoring and conserving the world’s precious freshwater resources,” they conclude.
Designers and suppliers of innovative products and services which support restoration projects can register their information for free on the Marketplace. Each year, the MERLIN project hosts its Innovation Awards to celebrate the products and services featured on the Marketplace. You can read about this year’s winners here.
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This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
The MERLIN Academy: a new open-access learning and resources hub for freshwater restoration
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.
This task is ever more important following last month’s news that – after a series of political hurdles – the EU Nature Restoration Law will be adopted. The law’s aim is to restore 20% of EU’s degraded ecosystems by 2030 and all by 2050, and to restore 25,000km of free-flowing rivers across the continent.
Clearly, the time for ambitious freshwater restoration is now, and the MERLIN Academy offers a hugely valuable set of open-access resources to guide visitors through the science, financing and stakeholder engagement involved in restoration. This work has a focus on the value of nature-based solutions, which aim to use natural processes to help tackle socio-environmental challenges like climate change.
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. Future Modules will be released from Autumn 2024 onwards.
The MERLIN Academy also hosts a vast Knowledge Centre which brings together resources around environmental restoration, nature-based solutions, governance and financing. These resources – which include websites, reports, videos, e-learning, datasets and much more – can be freely searched and accessed. The Academy also hosts the MERLIN webinars and podcasts which have been produced over the project’s lifespan so far.
“MERLIN learns a lot from close collaboration with restoration cases on the ground,” said project co-ordinator Sebastian Birk. “These experiences have shaped the design of the Academy, resulting in knowledge that is robust and actionable. Specifically, the e-learning platform with its modular course design has the potential to progressively bring in new restoration knowledge to educate future practitioners across various ecosystems within a landscape framework.”
“Developing the MERLIN Academy was quite a journey,” explained Academy development leader Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber. “From our first ideas to implementation, the process required a bit of thinking outside the scientific bubble in order to make the content understandable and accessible to a wider audience. The Learning Modules form the core to gain new knowledge in a very structured and easily digestible way, including quizzes to test what you have learned.
“The Knowledge Centre helps to find related resources about nature-based solutions and freshwater restoration, the webinars provide in-depth information on specific topics and the podcasts are just fun to listen to, an easy way to get in touch with this – sometimes difficult to understand – topic,” Schmidt-Kloiber continued. “My thanks go out to all MERLIN partners who have made this possible for their engagement and dedication.”
“Generating knowledge isn’t worth much if it does not reach the right audience,” added Academy development co-leader Franziska Wenskus. “With the MERLIN Academy, we make state-of-the-art knowledge about restoration planning, implementing and monitoring easily accessible to practitioners and managers on the ground. Drawing from the results of the MERLIN project and their longstanding professional experience, our experts teach you everything you need to know to get started with your restoration project.”
“Working on social media, I discovered that there is so much information and so many things happening at the same time,” outlined Academy technical editor Joselyn Veronica Arreaga Espin. “There are so many projects contributing their work that sometimes it is hard to keep up with all the input. The Academy offers a place where this information is gathered, making it easier to find what we are looking for. As communication is key and the world needs to know what is actually happening in our ‘small bubble’, offering the Learning Modules accomplishes this purpose. 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.”
Speaking about the launch of the first public Learning Module, developers Josselin Rouillard and Gerardo Anzaldua said, “This course will equip you with some essential insights to navigate new funding opportunities and identify the best fit for your restoration projects. Join the course and gain a better understanding of cost-benefit analysis, explore innovative financing mechanisms, and learn how to make a compelling case for the environmental and economic benefits of freshwater restoration.”
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Explore the MERLIN Academy here.
This article is supported by the MERLIN project.
The effects of multiple human impacts on streams can increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in their waters, potentially exacerbating the harmful effects of the climate crisis, new research suggests.
The study, led by the University Rey Juan Carlos-URJC and CBMA – University of Minho, found that streams exposed to multiple human impacts can contain double the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane: the two most important greenhouse gases. The research team – which also included scientists from the University of Barcelona and Centre for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications-CREAF – assessed how the concentration of these greenhouse gases responded to the combined impacts of nutrients, warming and low oxygen concentrations by conducting fieldwork in 50 streams across northern Portugal.
“Even though streams naturally have higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane compared to the atmosphere, this study demonstrates for the first time that the accumulation of multiple impacts exacerbates the concentrations of these gases and potentially their emissions into the atmosphere,” says Cayetano Gutiérrez-Cánovas, the lead author of the study and researcher at URJC. “Given that many rivers are already subject to several human impacts, there’s a considerable risk that the environmental degradation they cause could further exacerbate the climate crisis,” Gutiérrez-Cánovas continues.
Writing in Global Change Biology, the researchers also evaluated the role of the scale at which these human impacts take place to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that control greenhouse gas productions in streams. “Our findings indicate that the scale at which human impacts occur has varying effects on carbon dioxide and methane concentrations,” explains Daniel von Schiller, co-author of the study and associate professor at UB. “Carbon dioxide, being more soluble than methane and capable of traveling long distances through stream waters, appears to be influenced by impacts occurring throughout the catchment. However, our models suggest that methane, which can readily escape from water and enter the atmosphere, is responsive to both local and catchment-scale impacts.”
This research carries significant implications for river management. Current restoration and mitigation strategies often concentrate on local actions, overlooking broader catchment-scale impacts and their potential contributions to climatic stability. For example, one of the main concerns for river managers is reducing nutrient inputs to freshwaters, which can have dramatic ecological consequences, as shown by the situation in the Mar Menor lagoon in southeast Iberia.
“Our findings suggest that reducing nutrient inputs and addressing low oxygen conditions could provide additional co-benefits which aid in the fight against climate change,” says Cláudia Pascoal, senior author of the study and associate professor at CBMA-UMinho. “These results underscore the importance of managing rivers with a holistic, catchment-scale approach, not only to preserve biodiversity and benefits for people but also to mitigate the climate crisis.”
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MERLIN Podcast EP.8 – Stories from the water’s edge: getting freshwater restoration done in Europe
We’re delighted to share the latest episode of the MERLIN podcast with you.
This is a podcast telling stories about how restoration gets done across Europe. First we hear from Joshua Royte, a conservation scientist working for the Nature Conservancy in the USA. Josh has led ambitious river restoration projects across Maine, and is now an advisor to the EU MERLIN project. We hear Josh’s perspective on freshwater restoration in Europe, and the work the MERLIN project is doing to help bring its rivers, streams and wetlands back to life.
This work is explored in five fascinating stories from sites across Europe, each of which highlights the complexities of getting freshwater restoration done. Arturo Elosegi from the University of the Basque Country narrates a long-running – and now successful – story about working with communities to address local opposition to dam removal on the Deba River. Charlotte Neary from the Forth Rivers Trust in Scotland highlights the importance of finding and training local contractors to help make restoration a reality along the Forth Catchment, even when it requires unusual traditional methods such as water dowsing.
Nadine Gerner from Emschergenossenschaft tells the story of wildflower meadows blooming along the banks of the Emscher River in Germany, which was once so neglected that it became an open sewer. Nadine highlights the need for convincing stories about the success of such nature-based solutions in upscaling their use in restoration. Matea Jarak from WWF Adria recounts an eye-opening story from the Hutovo Blato peatlands in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a major release of water from a nearby hydropower plant flooded the restoration site. Matea highlights the importance of clear communication with people and organisations around a restoration area to avoid such catastrophic issues.
Finally, Iulia Puiu from WWF Romania shares the story of how she and her colleagues have been working to restore the floodplains of the Danube River, in order to buffer the effects of floods and droughts exacerbated by the ongoing climate emergency. A key challenge for Iulia and her team is communicating the need to return natural processes to floodplains which have been drained and developed for many years.
Together, the stories give a ‘behind the scenes’ snapshot of freshwater restoration projects taking place across Europe. They highlight that restoration is never a simple, straightforward process: instead one that often requires communication, persistence and improvisation in equal measures.
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.
Global migratory fish populations have declined by 81% since 1970: but river restoration projects offer hope
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.
The report – which monitored 1,864 populations of 284 migratory fish species across the world between 1970 and 2020 – states that habitat loss and degradation – which also includes the conversation of wetlands for agriculture – accounts for half of the threats to migratory species. Overfishing, increasing pollution and the growing impacts of the climate emergency all also contribute to the cocktail of pressures faced by migratory fish.
Populations of migratory salmon, trout, eel and sturgeon – alongside numerous other species – are not only vital to healthy freshwater ecosystems, but they also support the food security and livelihoods of millions of people who live around rivers, lakes and wetlands. This is particularly the case in areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where migratory fish support the livelihoods of tens of millions of people through fisheries, global trade and recreational angling.
“The catastrophic decline in migratory fish populations is a deafening wake-up call for the world. We must act now to save these keystone species and their rivers,” said Herman Wanningen, founder of the World Fish Migration Foundation. “Migratory fish are central to the cultures of many Indigenous Peoples, nourish millions of people across the globe, and sustain a vast web of species and ecosystems. We cannot continue to let them slip silently away.”
Despite its startling headline figure, the report contains glimmers of hope. Nearly one-third of the monitored migratory fish species populations have increased since 1970. The authors suggest that this means river restoration projects such as dam removals, habitat restoration and fisheries management can have positive effects on the health of migratory fish populations.
The report – supported by the World Fish Migration Foundation, ZSL, IUCN, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Wetlands International and WWF – highlights that thousands of river barriers are being removed across Europe and USA. In 2023, 487 barriers were removed across Europe (an increase of 50% on the previous year), whilst in the USA, some of the largest dam removals in history are underway along the Klamath River in California and Oregon.
The challenge is to keep the momentum behind these initiatives growing, to help restore free-flowing rivers that not only benefit migratory fish, but also the wider ecosystem and human communities. The embattled EU Nature Restoration Law – if passed – contains an imperative for European countries to restore 25,000km of free-flowing rivers across Europe, whilst in the USA the the White House’s America the Beautiful Freshwater Challenge Partnership offers the largest freshwater restoration and protection initiative in history. Moreover, major freshwater projects such as MERLIN are providing valuable tools for environmental managers seeking to implement and upscale restoration activities across Europe.
“In the face of declining migratory freshwater fish populations, urgent collective action is imperative,” said Michele Thieme, Deputy Director, Freshwater at WWF-US. “Prioritising river protection, restoration, and connectivity is key to safeguarding these species, which provide food and livelihoods for millions of people around the world. Let’s unite in this crucial endeavour, guided by science and shared commitment, to ensure abundance for generations to come.”
Read the 2024 Living Planet Index for Migratory Freshwater Fishes
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The Freshwater Blog 