V - Giving large-scale coastal ecosystem restoration a boost
The difficulty of achieving an integrated vision and measures to improve safety and boost biodiversity requires a wider and maintained support for restoration.
Agustin Sanchez-Arcilla, REST-COAST project coordinator
Coastal areas are some of the most productive and biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. With high levels of biodiversity, they have a large and often underappreciated potential for carbon capture and storage. Future management of these resources is essential to meeting the ambitious climate goals set out by the EU. However, many existing interventions are small scale, and focus on specific ecological or risk problems. A broader approach could bring compounding benefits to connected ecosystems, lowering costs and boosting natural capital. Upscaling such restoration projects faces several barriers in both planning and governance, however, including in technical, financial and socio-economic aspects. Addressing these is the goal of the EU-funded REST-COAST(opens in new window) project. “The difficulty of achieving an integrated vision and measures to improve safety and boost biodiversity requires a wider and maintained support for restoration,” explains Agustin Sanchez-Arcilla, professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia(opens in new window) in Spain and REST-COAST project coordinator. The REST-COAST project, a collaboration between 38 partners, aims to develop large-scale projects that increase the connectivity between rivers, coasts and oceans to improve the resilience of coastal ecosystem services. It will assess the potential benefits of restoring several ecosystems, including coastal marshes, seabed meadows and coastal dunes. “The delivery of ecosystem services needs a large enough restoration scale to assess the benefits of such ecosystem services, since the small-scale interventions commonly performed in the past do not provide a substantial enough demonstration in quantitative terms – for instance, in erosion and flooding risk reduction and blue carbon gains,” says Sanchez-Arcilla. The team will combine observations with model simulations, and run nine pilots in the main EU regional seas: the Atlantic, Baltic, Black, Mediterranean and North seas – with the aim of increasing the commitment of citizens, stakeholders and policymakers. These pilots will also benefit from advances in ecosystem service valuation and from the analysis of market conditions carried out through the project.