EUROLakes project proposes an innovative, holistic, and science-based approach to safeguarding and restoring European natural lakes and their ecosystems. This project builds upon the 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration, a practical methodology designed to seek sustainable, long-term solutions at the landscape level, with the aim of achieving four types of returns: inspiration, social benefits, natural restoration, and financial gains. This holistic approach is realized through five key elements: establishing a landscape partnership, fostering shared understanding, collaboratively envisioning the landscape, taking coordinated action, and continuously monitoring and learning. The EUROLakes project will establish local communities of practice and, in collaboration with them, develop and showcase innovative, integrated protection and restoration solutions, with a particular focus on nature-based solutions (NBS). These solutions will be demonstrated in three specific areas: Lake Vico in Italy, Lake Bistreţ in Romania, and Lake Dümmer in Germany. Furthermore, the project will highlight the long-term potential for replication by enhancing local capacity in Denmark, Ireland, and Moldova. These approaches will be complemented by modeling activities and the dissemination of knowledge regarding nature finance, contributing to a comprehensive adaptive management strategy aimed at restoring the ecological and chemical health of natural lakes to a "good" status. In this way, the EUROLakes project will directly contribute to the objectives of various EU instruments and policies, including the Water Framework Directive, the Green Deal, and its Mission objective to "restore, protect, and preserve the health of our oceans, seas, and waters by 2030."

The EU aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by at least 55% by 2030. This ambition requires fast mitigation measures within all sectors. Paludiculture is the productive land use of wet and rewetted peatlands and can reduce GHG emissions by up to 70-80%. It thus has a large potential to support the EU’s climate targets and biodiversity strategy and still provide farmers and landowners with income, but only if the practice is scaled up. Currently, there are too few large-scale sites involving local actors that demonstrate industrial scale paludiculture farming models. PaluWise's 4 large-scale paludiculture sites in Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom will showcase best practices and solutions for converting degraded organic soils to paludiculture. They develop field-scale operations and their associated five value chains (crops: Downy Birch, Reed, Sedges, Typha, Reed Canary Grass). By having two established (NL, UK) and two new sites (FI, PL), PaluWise can demonstrate different stages of paludiculture and associated value chains, emphasising replicability and scalability. Network sites (e.g., PaludiZentrale, Germany) will provide lessons learnt guidance and engage actors in innovating improvements (e.g. maintaining high water levels, adapting machinery, choosing suitable crop species). A multi-actor approach is applied to co-innovate and improve cost-effective, climate smart value chains. Activities cover the full sequence from deciding where to set up a site (WP1 decision support tool for rewettability), what works well in a site (WP2 demos), what are the benefits/impacts in emission reduction, carbon sequestration potential, biodiversity and other ecosystem services at landscape scale (WP3, WP4), and how to upscale and get support (WP5). We will identify barriers and provide recommendations to boost improved policy and legislation for large-scale deployment of paludiculture in Europe.

The REWET project will facilitate the sustainable restoration and conservation of terrestrial wetlands – freshwater wetlands, peatlands, and floodplains. To do so, REWET draws upon the network of carefully selected seven demonstrators (Open Labs ≥ 2400 ha in total) that cover a range of local conditions, geographic characteristics, governance structures and social/cultural settings to fully understand the wetlands-carbon-climate nexus and provide an replication plan to boost successful wetlands restoration throughout Europe and internationally. In the Open Labs, the most fit-for-purpose technologies will be applied for the monitoring of GHG (Eddy Covariance towers, satellite imagery, field measurements), biodiversity, and meteorological events. Furthermore, the social aspect will be analysed, by evaluating gender differences, locals, and key stakeholders acceptance. REWET has two additional strong scientific pillars: the assessment of EU wetlands status in Europe and modelling. Together with the Open Labs, they will fill out the gaps on wetlands science and provide guidance for cost-effective restoration and monitoring practices that are environmentally friendly, compatible with the future climate and provide a wide range of ecosystem services. As main outcomes, REWET will deliver a wetlands inventory with carbon sink potential, models for wetlands GHG emissions/sequestration under different scenarios including climate change, policy recommendations for wetlands restoration, sound business models and a roadmap for replication. The REWET consortium is a transdisciplinary partnership between researchers, industry partners (SME), non-profit entities, responsible agencies at the local and watershed/regional level and one international organisation, dedicated to achieving the desired outcomes of the project.

MYRIAD-EU’s vision is to catalyse the paradigm shift required to move towards a multi-risk, multi-sector, systemic approach to risk management. Our aim is that by the end of MYRIAD-EU policy-makers, decision-makers, and practitioners can develop forward-looking disaster risk management pathways that assess trade-offs and synergies across sectors, hazards, and scales. We will co-develop the first harmonised framework for multi-hazard, multi-sector, systemic risk management. It provides a set of practical guidelines for carrying out a multi-risk assessment, formalised in guidance protocols. We will develop a web-based dashboard for navigating the framework, which gives access to state-of-the-art products and services of MYRIAD-EU and links to key resources from external projects. Central to MYRIAD-EU is a laboratory of systemic multi-hazard risk assessment and management. Within this laboratory, we co-develop the framework, and products and services to operationalise the framework, with stakeholders in five multi-scale Pilots: North Sea, Canary Islands, Scandinavia, Danube, Veneto. Each Pilot focuses on (interlinkages between) three of the following six sectors: infrastructure & transport, food & agriculture, ecosystems & forestry, energy, finance, tourism. For each Pilot, we examine multi-hazard risk within the region, as well as indirect, cross-sectoral, and interregional risks throughout the EU. MYRIAD-EU is designed to maximise impact. Our laboratory ensures that designing solutions to real-world challenges is central and that stakeholder co-development occurs throughout the project. To ensure that we reach key stakeholders, our consortium includes a Sectoral Representative for each of our key sectors - a leading institute from practice with an excellent network. MYRIAD-EU sets itself apart from other projects by addressing multi-hazard risk management through the lens of forward-looking sustainability challenges cutting across sectors, regions, and hazards.

Wetlands cover 5-8% of the world’s land area and have a huge capacity to sequester carbon (C). Healthy wetlands accumulate C effectively due to water-logged conditions promoting highly stable C content. The EU aims to cut GHG emissions by at least 55% by 2030.This ambition requires new GHG mitigation measures within all sectors including LULUCF sector, where wetlands as C rich ecosystem can contribute to efficiently to both EU's climate targets and biodiversity strategy. Currently there is still a high uncertainty prevails of wetlands’ spatial and C sink extent, as well as source estimates and sustainable alternatives in restoration. This hinders the efficient use of wetlands in C mitigation and adaptation in the context of other LULUCF mitigation options. We will advance the state-of-the-art on the geospatial knowledge base on wetlands and their use and degradation in Europe. We will apply a co-creation approach to develop procedural knowledge and find ways for integrating multiple targets, supporting more inclusive, community-based approaches to wetland restoration. Diverse novel experimental data on ecosystems’ responses to wetlands’ management and restoration regimes under different types of land-use and will be acquired and synthesised on biodiversity and other ecosystem services (BES). At the local level, Living Labs (LL) support and integrate interdisciplinary and multi-actor research on ecological, environmental, economic, and social issues. Models will be utilised to scale up experimental data from LLs, to gain an understanding of the potential impacts of upscaled wetland restoration options on BES provision, as well as changes in BES provision at the EU level for various policy-relevant time periods and the most policy-relevant CC mitigation and BD targets. We will assess the societal impacts of wetland restoration, especially on BES benefits and costs of different restoration approaches and wellbeing impacts at local, national, and EU levels.