Living labs co-creating solutions for the restoration of ecosystems addressing implementation bottlenecks and improving resilience to risks

Expected Outcome:

Proposals are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• stakeholders are empowered to co-create, deploy and replicate viable ecosystem restoration measures leading to their wider uptake, with solutions to address implementation bottlenecks and financing issues;
• competent authorities in charge of implementing the EU Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) can design and reuse effective deployment frameworks, informed by evidence and lessons generated through living labs across different contexts;
• social, economic and environmental co-benefits, risks and trade-offs of nature restoration activities are demonstrated, addressed and made explicit to support informed decision-making and scaling, including, where appropriate, potential One Health aspects.

Scope:

The NRR requires Member States to put in place area-based restoration measures, including Nature-based solutions, as highlighted and recommended in both the EU Climate adaptation strategy and in the European Water Resilience Strategy. Notably measures to implement the NRR article 9 on free-flowing rivers support the objectives of the European Water Resilience Strategy to restore and protect the water cycle, and the Water Framework Directive objective of good ecological status of rivers. NRR Article 11 on the restoration of agricultural ecosystems aims inter alia at developing high-diversity landscape features. Related strategies: the Vision for Agriculture and Food, the EU soil strategy for 2030, the EU Forest Strategy for 2030, the new EU bioeconomy strategy and the European Ocean Pact reflect the objectives of the NRR. The communication on integrated wildfire risk management^[1] highlights the need for more research on preventive restoration integrating wildfire prevention and post-fire recovery objectives in nature restoration activities. More science-based operational restoration approaches are needed to identify scalable solutions that overcome implementation bottlenecks, notably financing. Nature restoration can deliver major biodiversity, climate adaptation, water resilience and overall One Health benefits. However, in some contexts, restoration may also modify the suitability of habitats (for instance disease vectors and reservoir/host communities). Proposals are therefore encouraged to consider these aspects in cooperation with relevant public health and environmental authorities. Synergies with the EU Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation which supports result-based incentives for carbon farming and carbon removal activities that demonstrate co-benefits for biodiversity and ecosystem services have to be developed. Living labs^[2] are expected to foster collaboration between sectors and communities through a strong place-based approach to co-design and co-create systemic solutions and to function as learning environments that enable reflection, comparison and feedback on implementation pathways, governance arrangements and enabling conditions for ecosystem restoration.

Proposals should:

• support the set-up of three new living labs, with 8 to 15 experimental sites each, across different ecosystems, as places for co-creating, testing and demonstrating innovative solutions to restore ecosystems following three main principles: (i) co-creation with a large and balanced set of stakeholders e.g. researchers, land and water managers (including farmers and foresters) and/or owners, policy decision makers, economic actors, civil society, social partners, municipalities and regions interested in nature restoration ensuring an adequate representation of primary-sector actors, (ii) activities carried out in real-life settings and (iii) involving stakeholders (including practitioners) at all stages of development;
• cover different geographical regions or climate zones and at least three different EU Member States and/or Associated Countries, including sites in outermost regions; address gender dimension; establish a work plan of activities to be developed during the project lifetime, ensuring the co-design, co-development, and co-implementation of innovative and scalable solutions and describing the rationale for cooperation across the living labs and among the stakeholders within the living labs;
• act as real-life policy experimentation environments, enabling the testing of regulatory, financial and governance innovations. Proposals should ensure the active involvement of competent public authorities (e.g. ministries, agencies, regional or local administrations) and establish feedback mechanisms to inform policy-making;
• assess the ecosystem conditions (baselines), anticipate restoration trajectories and establish sustainable monitoring mechanisms to track progress towards the objectives, which should correspond to the EU legislation where relevant;
• identify pertinent bottlenecks to the mainstreaming and upscaling of the implementation of nature restoration activities, such as financing, economic, regulatory or scientific knowledge issues, permitting, risk management, land tenure and access, social engagement, governance or technical issues, skills and trainings; explore their causes including behavioural and cultural factors; and propose solutions to address them; assess the feasibility, replicability, effectiveness, efficiency and benefits of identified solutions, and their capacity to ensure that the results of restoration are maintained over time;
• establish and use harmonised Key Performance Indicators and MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) protocols compatible with the NRR and the European Water Resilience Strategy and develop integrated impact assessment frameworks capturing environmental, social, economic and governance dimensions, including long-term transformation effects and where relevant One Health indicators;
• identify sites demonstrating exemplary solutions for nature restoration, to be used as lighthouses for training, peer-to-peer learning, and communication;
• define sustainability pathways, governance structures and business models ensuring their continuation beyond the project duration.

Proposals should address Area A: building risk-resilience with restoration or Area B: developing effective and viable restoration practices in agriculture and forestry. The area (A or B) should be clearly indicated on the application.

Under Area A, proposals should demonstrate causality between restoration activities and improved, nature-based disaster risk reduction and resilience, notably to extreme weather events. At least one living lab should address water resilience against floods and droughts, through restoration of the natural connectivity of rivers and the water retention capacity and natural functions of floodplains including for aquifer recharge, while engaging with freshwater-related sectors, addressing specific implementation gaps and/or bottlenecks to contribute to the objectives of free-flowing rivers and good ecological status. Proposals addressing wetland, floodplain, riparian or water-retention measures are encouraged to consider potential health-related trade-offs, including vector habitat suitability, in cooperation with competent authorities, including public health. At least one living lab should address fire risk management in agriculture and forestry, with cost-benefit analysis and avoided loss and damages assessments, while engaging with landowners, managers, insurances, emergency services and relevant authorities. Proposals should address post-disaster ecosystem restoration, encompassing implementation bottlenecks alongside recovery processes.

Under Area B, proposals should focus on restoration through biodiversity-friendly farming and forestry systems, including agroecological approaches such as agroforestry or grazing-based grassland systems, organic farming and systems providing for high diversity landscape features or environmental set-aside. Sites should be selected along a gradient of intensity of practises and evaluate restoration challenges from areas starting conversion processes to areas with anteriority in recognised “biodiversity-friendly” systems. Proposals should measure their potential to achieve restoration objectives using MRV protocols. At least one living lab should develop, test and validate tools to strengthen in-situ conservation of genetic resources and sustainable use of agro-biodiversity and/or forest biodiversity. Focus should be on developing decentralised, farmer- and forester-informed data systems and strategies to equip practitioners with evidence-based insights for biodiversity selection and integration for specific uses and environments. Additionally, standard protocols for local genetic resource maintenance and exchange should be developed. At least one of the living labs should integrate a strong focus on financing restoration. Monitoring and verification methods to assess the biodiversity impacts of carbon farming practices, notably in the context of the CRCF framework, should be developed. Projects should also explore, where relevant, how such methods may interact with biodiversity support schemes, including emerging nature credit mechanisms^[3].

Proposals should ensure complementarities and avoid duplications with the activities of relevant EU-funded projects and initiatives, including the Agroecology Partnership, the Forest Partnershio, the EU Mission Soil, the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, and should establish cooperation with the living labs established under those instruments as relevant.

Concrete efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of the funded projects is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable), particularly for real-time data feeds, exploring workflows that can provide “FAIR-by-design” data, i.e., data that is FAIR from its generation. Possibilities offered by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to store and give access to research data should be considered. A citizen science approach could be appropriate for this action to produce, collect and analyse data.

Living labs are expected to dedicate resources for networking activities with other living labs, under the lead of the CSA that will be supported under the topic HORIZON-NATURE-2027-02-03: Networking to scale up living labs for nature restoration solutions and to address bottlenecks to implementation.

This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines and the involvement of SSH experts, institutions as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH expertise, across all phases of the living lab process, including co-design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, with particular attention to behavioural change, social acceptance, participatory governance and conflict mediation, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.

Proposals must apply the multi-actor approach involving stakeholders as indicated under (i), first item of the scope.

Financial support to third parties (FSTP) to facilitate active involvement of small actors (e.g. land managers, SMEs or civil society) in one or more of the living labs of a project, can be provided through calls. A maximum of 30% of the proposed budget should be allocated to this purpose.

In order to increase synergies and the impact of the projects, all proposals selected for funding should ensure close cooperation with the EC Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD)^[4] and its Science Service, including participating in answering science to policy requests.

[1] Communication on Integrated Wildfire Risk Management

[2] https://enoll.org/living-labs/

[3] ENV - EU releases its roadmap towards nature credits

[4] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/biodiversity-knowledge-centre_en