The CLIMAREST project - Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin - integrates multiple expertise into a holistic approach do demonstrate and establish guidelines for ecosystem restoration and to enhance climate resilience in coastal communities.
Coastal marine ecosystems are vitally important for human well-being, offering a range of essential services including food provisioning, coastal protection, and climate regulation. These ecosystems are currently under significant strain from human activities. In the last century, the intensifying impacts of industrialisation, resource extraction, and population growth along coastlines have led to widespread habitat degradation and loss. Marine activities such as shipping, fishing, aquaculture, and the extraction of marine aggregates, combined with terrestrial influences from agriculture and industrial effluents, have inflicted considerable environmental stress on these areas. The impact of these human activities is compounded by climate change, which further threatens marine biodiversity and disrupts ecosystems. Although regional and global assessments have been made to gauge the extent of anthropogenic impacts there remains a high level of uncertainty regarding the interactions between different pressures and their cumulative impacts on marine ecosystems.
Restoration and coastal resilience solutions are developed and piloted five demos in five different ecosystems, across a latitudinal gradient of the Arctic-Atlantic basin, ranging from the high-Arctic Svalbard (79° N) in the North to the Madeira archipelago (33° N) in the South. The variety of environmental conditions and restoration needs of the five demonstration sites will provide different restoration scenarios with particular specificities in terms of biodiversity, pressures and threats, ecosystems services and stakeholders. The diversity in restoration scenarios will create a unique opportunity to develop a modular toolbox, that integrates common tools with tools that are specific for each restoration scenario into a collective framework. The marine restoration toolbox integrates expert knowledge, scientific information, multilevel stakeholder and community involvement, ecosystem service analysis, cost-benefit analysis, priority of actions, and custom designed protocols for restoring and monitoring multiple coastal habitats. Ecosystem-specific innovations in nature-based solutions for habitat restoration that improve local climate resilience will also be developed, tested, and integrated into a general toolbox framework, establishing guidelines and innovative workflows. The toolbox and tools developed in each demonstration site, for different restoration scenarios, will be made available and tested for replication and upscaling in comparable ecosystems and similar communities, with particular emphasis in promoting stakeholder involvement.
