EU H2020 Green Deal: Rest-Coast

Project introduction

REST-COAST will demonstrate to what extent upscaled coastal restoration can provide a low-carbon adaptation, reducing risks and providing gains in biodiversity for vulnerable coastal ecosystems, such as wetlands or sea grass beds. By overcoming present technical, economic, governance and social barriers to restoration upscaling, REST-COAST will develop the large-scale river coast connectivity and increase nearshore accommodation space for the resilient delivery of coastal ecosystem services (ESS).

Project challenges

We are involved in Work Package 4, that will develop scalable adaptation plans with restoration design methodology to enable regional and local coastal managers and other stakeholders to deploy large scale restoration through upscaling and packaging of NBS building blocks (i.e. individual NBS) into adaptation pathways.

Task 4.2 entails the development of a framework for co-development of restoration with NBS building blocks and quantified ESS, including multicriteria comparisons of NBS blocks single/joint performance. As a start, the restoration pilots in the Ems-Dollard will be analyzed to identify smaller and more homogeneous units in terms of key biophysical and socioeconomic variables. This will result in a systematic downscaling approach to define NBS as building blocks of large scale restoration, enabling a refinement of each NBS and the optimization of synergies among the blocks. This approach will be tested at other core sites.