EUSTAFOR attends SUPERB event on National Restoration Plans

On 10 March 2025, EUSTAFOR participated in a high-level policy event aimed at supporting the development of National Restoration Plans (NRPs) under the EU Nature Restoration Regulation. This event, organised by the EU’s Green Deal Ecosystem Restoration cluster projects, European Commission project officers, and the Prospex Institute, with support from the Green Deal Support Office and REA, showcased SUPERB, MERLIN, REST-COAST, and WaterLANDS.

During the morning panel with cluster project coordinators, Elisabeth Schatzdorfer, SUPERB coordinator (the project that subcontracted EUSTAFOR), highlighted three key points:

1. • The need for the application of adaptive, forward-looking restoration in their NRPs to respond to climate change and diverse societal needs. A very important measure is assisted tree migration. Since the NRR is very narrow on the definition of native tree species, here the recommendation was to consider dropping the optional NRR indicator on ‘Share of forests dominated by native tree species’.
   • The importance of clarity and transparency about the trade-offs to get broad societal support, because e.g. restored sites may have a reduced C sink capacity or may temporarily even become a source of carbon, or the restoration actions may benefit some parts of biodiversity, while others are not favoured;
   • The need to address omnipresent browsing issues at the national and local levels, which is a major cause for forest degradation and hindrance for forest restoration and adaptation, also dramatically increasing the costs of forest restoration due to the required protective measures.

In the afternoon, three breakout sessions focused on key themes:

1. Financing restoration
2. Synergies, trade-offs, monitoring, and prioritisation
3. Stakeholder engagement and governance

EUSTAFOR’s Senior Policy Advisor Amila Meškin joined the discussion on synergies and trade-offs, monitoring and prioritisation. During the discussion, it was noted that targeting low-hanging fruit is one strategy that allows public authorities to showcase achievable results quickly. For instance, this can be done by prioritising reactive ecosystems. It was also highlighted that demonstrating the pursuit of multiple goals (for instance, biodiversity restoration and protection from flooding) can make projects more acceptable. Monitoring was emphasised as a tool for both guiding restoration actions and bringing stakeholders on board through evidence. Considering the difficulty of monitoring every single restoration action, participants promoted Randomised and sampling-based approaches for monitoring.

Full report from the event is available at SUPERB website.