European coastal ecosystems—including seagrass meadows, salt marshes and mudflats—are increasingly threatened by climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and human development. These fragile environments provide essential ecosystem services: they support biodiversity, regulate climate and water cycles, store carbon, protect our coast against extreme events, and offer cultural and recreational value. Restoring them is key to enhancing ecosystem resilience and securing benefits for both nature and people.
REWRITE aims to develop innovative approaches and nature-based solutions for the rewilding of coastal ecosystems. It seeks to align environmental priorities—such as carbon sequestration, climate adaptation, and biodiversity recovery—with societal needs and uses.
To do so, REWRITE addresses four major challenges:
1/ Reducing uncertainty about future ecosystem trajectories under different scenarios—restoration, rewilding, “do nothing”, or business-as-usual—by improving our fragmented ecological and social understanding.
2/ Assessing cascading effects of climate change and biodiversity loss across scales to better support local natural capital and shoreline resilience.
3/ Understanding societal engagement with rewilding, including how people perceive and negotiate trade-offs between ecological restoration and competing land-use pressures.
4/ Transferring the concept of rewilding—originally applied to terrestrial ecosystems—to coastal contexts, where it remains largely undefined in research and policy.
The project draws on a broad network of expertise, spanning natural and social sciences and humanities, and works across ten demonstration sites from Denmark to Spain, and USA and Canada. By integrating natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, and engaging with local and European actors, REWRITE aims to shape visions of rewilded, resilient, and equitable European coastal areas.
