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."

PALUS DEMOS will establish 3 large scale paludiculture demonstration sites to provide insights in new agricultural business models, increased employment, and improved biodiversity and water quality in line with the objectives of the EU Green Deal. PALUS DEMOS will inspire entrepreneurs in agriculture, biobased manufacturing industry, communities, politicians, water and nature organisations and many others, that paludiculture will provide a new direction to preserve peat pastures, carbon stores and reduce GHG emissions. The proposed bottom-up approach (agriculture feeds science) is an opportunity that can improve social, economic and environmental sustainability, offering a future-proof model for agricultural entrepreneurs. Our demonstrators will act as lighthouses or beacons for local stakeholders and others from right across Europe & beyond. The focus of these demonstrators, supported by many of Europe’s leading experts, is to develop a range of best practices and land uses in strategic locations in three European countries ideally placed to spearhead the establishment of paludiculture practice and markets across Europe in a climate smart farming way. Beyond state of the art, we will establish co-created sustainable paludiculture practices at each of the three demonstrators. This will be fully supported by policy recommendations identifying enablers, barriers and policy gaps. We will work with stakeholders to develop (socio-)economic models using the quadruple helix innovation system, including government, industry, academia, and society. Our work will be supported by the development of long term business plans, it will include end users of the produced biomass and will be supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools co-created with stakeholders leading us towards an evidence based policy approach to paludiculture innovation.

WaterLANDS aims to enable an upscaling of the restoration of wetlands. Socio-economic factors, insufficient stakeholder engagement, lack of government commitment, lack of funding and inadequate exchange of knowledge of restoration methods have all been identified as barriers to successful restoration. Consequently, most restoration has been modest in scale, has occurred mainly where there is a single landowning or responsible organisation, and has often been undertaken principally for reasons of conservation. WaterLANDS will work to overcome these barriers. It includes both Action and Knowledge Sites, the former being the object of restoration upscaling, and the latter a source of best practice experience and knowledge. To provide for local support and sustainability, it will aim for the co-design of restoration with the on-going engagement of communities and stakeholders. It will investigate best practice in ecological restoration which meets both biodiversity and social objectives and for which restoration trajectories are specific to the physical and cultural context of the Action Sites. It will propose supportive governance structures appropriate to this process and to local and national circumstances. It will identify business models, economic incentives and international funding sources and tailor or direct these resources for each site. The project will pull this expertise and knowledge together in a co-creation work package. Process-indicators will be developed to enable on-going assessment of restoration success in terms of ecosystem services, socioeconomic embedding and financial sustainability, to ensure wide-scale restoration which catalyses scalability beyond the life of the WaterLANDS project.