Assessing Coastal Wetlands and Their Role in Climate Mitigation: Policy Briefs #8 and #9 from RESTORE4Cs

RESTORE4Cs Policy Briefs 8-9

The collection of multi-language Policy Briefs from the RESTORE4Cs Project (https://www.restore4cs.eu/resources/policy-briefs), provides best practices and science-based knowledge on European coastal wetlands restoration, gathered through the three years of project, and across 6 case studies.

In this article we talk about Policy Brief #8 and #9.

Policy Brief #8 “Advancing a coherent framework for assessing European coastal wetland condition”, addresses the lack of a clear definition of coastal wetlands, a shortcoming that results in these areas often being overlooked within policy frameworks. The document advances a harmonised definition of coastal wetlands, aligned with the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971), that captures the full land-sea continuum where salt, brackish, and fresh waters interact.

Moreover, building on that definition, it provides a harmonised spatial mapping approach, to delineate coastal wetlands across Europe, establishing a consistent EU-wide baseline for monitoring their extent and condition.

You can download the full document in English here: https://www.restore4cs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/EN_Policy-Brief-8-v5_Final.pdf

Policy Brief #9 “How can coastal wetland restoration mitigate climate change? What we know and what is still unclear”, proposes coastal wetland restoration as a promising NbS (Nature-based Solution) for climate change mitigation. In fact, restored wetlands act as net carbon sinks, increasing carbon stocks in plant biomass and soil, without a corresponding increase in GHG emissions. At the same time, it highlights inconsistencies in the availability of data about carbon stocks and GHG emissions across countries and wetland types. Freshwater wetlands and transitional waters in Europe are still underrepresented in empirical evidence.

The document also highlights that the focus is primarily on carbon stocks, rather than GHG emissions, while the reporting of GHG flux data is not yet standardised.

Read and download the document here to get the key policy recommendations: https://www.restore4cs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/EN_Policy-Brief-9-v7_Final.pdf

RESTORE4Cs Policy Briefs #6 and #7: Coastal Wetlands Indicators and Social Acceptability

RESTORE4Cs Policy Brief 6 (1)

The RESTORE4Cs project has published two more Policy Briefs that add to the 5 previously published by the consortium: https://www.restore4cs.eu/resources/policy-briefs/.

Policy Brief #6 “European Coastal Wetland Indicators: A proposal for monitoring policy processes across space and time”, offers a practical approach to track the status, trends, and policy performance of Europe’s coastal wetlands.

In fact, despite covering less than 0.6% of the European landscape, coastal wetlands provide important benefits to the environment, such as carbon storage, protection from storm, regulation of water flows. They also filter pollutants, and support a diversity of threatened species.

In order to protect and preserve wetlands, countries need to be able to monitor them through robust and harmonised indicators that track their extent, health, biodiversity, the progress of restorations, GHG emissions and removals, among others. The RESTORE4Cs approach integrates remote sensing, GIS, modelling, machine learning and in-situ monitoring to enable timely and high-quality assessment. You can read and download the full document: https://www.restore4cs.eu/restore4cs-6th-policy-brief

Policy Brief #7 “Social Acceptability: The Key Ingredient for Enhanced Coastal Wetland Restoration”, tackles the topic of social acceptability (the degree to which something reflects a community’s values, beliefs, and norms), and how this can “make or break” the success of wetland restoration across six European sites. Using a participatory, multi-criteria analysis, RESTORE4Cs researchers combined scientific assessments with local stakeholders’ perspectives.

They also analysed which key drivers play a bigger role in shaping acceptability: according to their findings, these are local economic interests, environmental benefits, and cultural values, while other aspects, such as trust, participation, and contextual knowledge, seem to be undervalued in decision-making.

Read and download the document here to get the key policy recommendations: https://www.restore4cs.eu/restore4cs-7th-policy-brief

RESTORE4Cs releases two new Policy Briefs on wetlands restoration

RESTORE4Cs Policy Brief 4-5

The Horizon Europe RESTORE4Cs project has released its 4th and 5th Policy Briefs:

  • Policy Brief #4: “Beyond public funds: diversifying financing for wetland restoration”, highlighting the urgent need to complement public funding with innovative financial instruments to ensure long-term wetland restoration in Europe.
  • Policy Brief #5: “Advancing Policy Integration Across Mediterranean Countries: Aligning with the Barcelona Convention and International Commitments Through a Common Evidence-Based Strategy”, promoting a harmonised set of indicators and metrics for evidence-based coastal wetlands protection strategies.

These documents provide funding entities and policymakers with clear, well-summarised knowledge from real studies, helping them understand the importance of taking specific actions.

To start with, wetlands provide essential services such as flood protection, clean water, and carbon storage, to name a few. Despite their importance, they still receive less than 9% of global nature-based solution funding. The RESTORE4Cs Case Pilots presented in Policy Brief 4 show that long-term management, monitoring, and maintenance remain severely underfunded, with public funds usually covering only the initial restoration costs.

Moreover, the ongoing loss of wetlands highlights the urgent need for effective policies to protect and restore these vital ecosystems. We need a framework that allows for consistent assessments of their health and status, guides adaptive management practices, and ensures that conservation and restoration efforts align with regional and international objectives.

For this reason, Policy Brief 5 explores a full set of performance indicators and metrics.
These key indicators will serve as a strategic planning framework to help countries plan, implement, and evaluate the impacts of their actions. They establish reference points to measure national efforts, identify areas for improvement, and support data-driven decision-making.

Read the full documents on RESTORE4Cs to learn more about the key recommendations and solutions proposed by the partners:

RESTORE4Cs issues Policy Brief on the positive climate impact of coastal wetlands

Restore4Cs policy brief news image

RESTORE4Cs (https://www.restore4cs.eu/) is the EU-funded project dedicated to climate change, biodiversity loss and habitat degradation, focusing on the sustainable management of European wetlands. These natural coastal areas of saltwater and freshwater play a key role in achieving the EU objectives regarding climate neutrality, biodiversity protection, zero-pollution, flood protection, and the circular economy. 

Led by the University of Aveiro (Portugal), the RESTORE4Cs consortium aims to assess the role of restoration action on wetlands’ capacity, through an integrative socio-ecological systems approach.

Within the scope of this objective, on 9 September 2024, the project launched its first Policy Brief, which highlights the aspect of Greenhouse Gas emissions. 

European coastal wetlands have the capacity to reduce emissions consistently, through the so-called “carbon sequestration”, which generally refers to the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In the case of wetlands, this is made possible thanks to their vegetation, and via sedimentation processes: they can store large amounts of organic carbon in their soil, due to their rapid growth and slow decomposition rates. Additionally, coastal wetlands generally release lower levels of methane compared to other types of wetlands. Moreover, they help trap organic particles carried by the flooding water, increasing the levels of organic carbon in the soil and forming organic-rich reservoirs called “blue carbon sinks”. 

Given their importance in our ecosystem, it is not surprising that Europe is investing in the protection of these precious environments: just a few weeks ago, at the end of August, RESTORE4Cs had joined three akin projects (ALFAwetlands, REWET and WET HORIZONS) in the SERE2024 Conference, an event entirely dedicated to Ecological Restoration. 

With the Policy Brief, authored by members of the European Topic Center, University of Malaga and University of Valencia (Spain), and the German Ecologic Institute, the project reinforces this message, by highlighting some key takeaways:

  1. the important role of wetlands as natural carbon stores
  2. the need to preserve the ones in good status, and urgently restore the endangered ones, as a cost-effective climate mitigation strategy
  3. the use of carbon certification schemes as additional tools to unlock new financial resources.
  4. the promotion of incentives for climate-friendly companies

You can read or download the full document at this link: https://www.restore4cs.eu/restore4cs-1st-policy-brief/