Restoring Europe’s freshwater ecosystems at the scale required by EU policy will require a broader mix of funding sources. The MERLIN Deliverable “Diversifying Funding for Freshwater Restoration using Nature-Based Solutions” examines how restoration teams across Europe are exploring new funding models and partnerships.

This policy brief offers recommendations for EU and national policymakers to enable diversified funding for nature restoration. It draws on lessons from four Horizon 2020 projects – MERLIN, REST‑COAST, SUPERB, and WaterLANDS – that together worked across Europe to test how restoration projects can attract broader support and financing.

This report presents a strategic, evidence-based approach to support the upscaling of freshwater restoration and implementation of Nature-based Solutions across Europe. Central to the approach is the MERLIN Upscaling Workflow, a flexible decision-support tool that uses Europe-wide datasets to identify high-impact restoration areas.

In this episode of the MERLIN Podcast, the conversation turns to the role of agriculture in freshwater restoration. The hosts speak with Josselin Rouillard, an Ecologic Institute researcher involved in the EU-funded MERLIN project, about how water-friendly farming can be scaled up across Europe. Drawing on new policy recommendations, they discuss how the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) could be reshaped to better support freshwater ecosystems and promote water-resilient agricultural landscapes.

In this episode of the MERLIN Podcast, we take a tour of the MERLIN Academy, an online platform offering free training and resources to support freshwater restoration across Europe. The hosts speak with Academy coordinator Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber (BOKU), alongside module leaders Erica Zaja (UKCEH), Kerry Waylen (James Hutton Institute), and Ecologic Institute's Gerardo Andalzua, as well as Academy user Lars Kristian Selbekk. Together, they highlight the importance of sharing open-access knowledge and reflect on key themes such as nature-based solutions, financing and economics, stakeholder engagement, and governance.

With the 2027 deadline of the Water Framework Directive approaching and the new Nature Restoration Regulation mandating large-scale ecosystem recovery, the CAP’s role in safeguarding rivers, wetlands, and catchments has become critical. This Policy Working Paper argues that long-term agricultural resilience is inseparable from healthy freshwater ecosystems and illustrates how water restoration can be embedded in future agricultural policies to enhance water resilience.

Europe's environment is in an alarming state, with climate change expected to further aggravate the situation. This substantially threatens economic prosperity, human wellbeing and social peace. Our society and economy need systemic transformative change, and ecosystem restoration integrated into nature-based solutions lies at its heart. MERLIN (Mainstreaming Ecological Restoration of freshwater-related ecosystems in a Landscape context: Innovation, upscaling and transformation) is a 4-year Innovation Action project (funded by the EU) which aims to support transformative ecosystem restoration. The project will work in 17 flagship projects, from Finland to Israel, in order to generate a blueprint for to implement, upscale and replicate restoration and nature based solutions in freshwater ecosystems.