MERLIN
Mainstreaming transformative ecosystem restoration and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) across all of Europe’s freshwater environments
Climate change poses severe threats to economic prosperity, human wellbeing and social peace and requires systemic transformative change.
Ecosystem restoration is key to this change, and freshwaters play an important role: the restoration of streams, rivers, peatlands and wetlands has a long tradition and offers an extensive knowledge base – freshwaters are ideal demonstrators of the necessary change.
The MERLIN project, a research and innovation action funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, commits to transformative ecosystem restoration. It involves 47 partners from across Europe, including universities, research institutes, nature conservation organizations, and stakeholders from business, government, and municipalities.
The MERLIN project aims to mainstream transformative ecosystem restoration and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) across all of Europe’s freshwater environments. MERLIN aspires to go beyond mainstreaming business as usual to mainstreaming a transformation in our relationship with the freshwater environment as a response to the biodiversity and climate crises.
This involves working at the landscape, regional, national and EU scales to understand how different public and private organisations can work together. The mainstreaming activities include:
- Where to mainstream? – Mapping restoration needs and opportunities.
- Who can mainstream? – Illustrating how organisations can work with Nature.
- How to mainstream? – Identifying policy, value chain, and private financing enablers and barriers.
The project works top down from EU level data and institutions; and bottom up from the experiences within our 18 case studies. The project focuses on transformative changes within six economic sectors with 6 MERLIN sectoral strategies providing a vision for integrating Nature-based Solutions (NbS) into key economic sectors navigation, agriculture, hydropower, insurance, peat extraction, water supply and sanitation.
