MERLIN Podcast: Bringing Europe’s freshwaters back to life

In March 2026, MERLIN scientific coordinator Daniel Hering stood before a Brussels room full of European policymakers and set out what four years of freshwater restoration had found. The evidence is clear, the tools are ready, the Nature Restoration Regulation is now law. The question is whether the will – political, institutional, financial – can match the ambition.
A few days later, we joined MERLIN project coordinator Sebastian Birk and Ellis Penning – who coordinates the SpongeScapes project and helped moderate the Brussels event – on the banks of restored streams in Belgium's Scheldt catchment. Away from the conference rooms and presentation slides, the conversation took a different shape, rooted in a landscape that is slowly and visibly recovering.
This final episode moves between those two worlds – the formal and the reflective, the policy stage and the riverbank. Between them, it captures something of what this landmark project has achieved, and what the freshwaters it set out to restore still need.

The Nature Restoration Regulation is now European law. National Restoration Plans are being written. The targets are set. So why does transformative, large-scale ecological restoration remain so stubbornly difficult to achieve, and what would it actually take to make it happen everywhere, not just in flagship protected areas?
That question sat at the heart of a panel discussion held in Brussels in March 2026, at a joint event bringing together the EU Horizon projects MERLIN, WaterLANDS, SpongeScapes and SpongeWorks. Moderated by Ellis Penning of SpongeScapes, the panel brought together Anders Iversen and Willem Jan Goossen from the European Commission, Craig Bullock of WaterLANDS, and Sebastian Birk, coordinator of MERLIN, fresh from four years overseeing freshwater restoration work across 18 sites in very different corners of Europe.
In this episode we tune into that conversation, ranging across governance, finance, agricultural and environmental policy, and the challenge of building the kind of shared ecological literacy that makes transformative change possible. It is a candid, reflective and ultimately hopeful discussion, held at a moment when the tools and evidence for restoration have never been better, and the pressure to act has never been greater.

Freshwater restoration should be at the heart of how farming is managed in Europe, according to new recommendations.
Reshaping the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to support freshwater ecosystems by encouraging water-friendly farming practices is a key task, accoring to a team of researchers from the EU MERLIN project writing in a newly published policy brief. The researchers draw on cutting-edge science and fieldwork to outline a vision for water-resilient agricultural landscapes across Europe.
Our guest is one of those researchers – Josselin Rouillard from ECOLOGIC – and in this podcast we’ll hear about how the futures of European freshwaters and farming are so closely linked, and what we can do to help them flourish.

In this podcast we take a tour of the MERLIN Academy, an online platform which offers free resources and training to support researchers, practitioners and policy makers in applying cutting-edge freshwater restoration concepts to their work.
We hear from Academy coordinator Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber from BOKU, and module leaders Erica Zaja from CEH, Gerardo Andalzua from ECOLOGIC and Kerry Waylen from the James Hutton Institute, alongside reflections from Academy user Lars Kristian Selbekk.
The interviewees emphasise the importance of sharing free, open-access information on freshwater restoration to wide audiences. They discuss the importance of nature-based solutions, financing and economics, stakeholder engagement and governance to contemporary restoration approaches.
https://project-merlin.eu/academy.html

Harnessing the potential of natural processes in freshwater restoration can create significant ecological, social and economic benefits, according to a major new report.
Researchers from the MERLIN project analysed restoration monitoring data from eighteen rivers, streams and wetlands across Europe to assess the impacts of so-called ‘nature-based solutions’ on the environment and society. Such approaches aim to help amplify natural processes to benefit both people and nature. For example, a healthy wetland can help filter water pollution and buffer floodwaters, whilst planting so-called ‘riparian zones’ of trees and other vegetation along river banks can help provide valuable biodiversity habitat, keep water bodies cool, and lock up carbon to help mitigate climate change.
The new report explores the impacts of a diverse range of European freshwater restoration strategies using nature-based solutions. These include peatland rewetting, beaver reintroduction, floodplain restoration and reconnection across a variety of landscapes. The results show that such restoration approaches can generate significant benefits for nature and society. In particular, many of the impacts support the goals of the European Green Deal, which aims to support climate neutrality, sustainable economies and healthy, diverse ecosystems across the continent.
In this podcast, we hear from two MERLIN researchers behind the new report: Laura Pott from the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Axel Schwerk from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. Laura and Axel cover a range of topics including how to monitor the impacts of nature-based solutions in complex landscapes across Europe, the importance of engaging stakeholder groups around an ecosystem, and the value of Theory of Change approaches in helping map how a restored landscape might develop over time.