CLIMAREST. Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin

The CLIMAREST project - Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin - integrates multiple expertise into a holistic approach, to develop a toolbox designed to establish guidelines for ecosystem restoration and to enhance climate resilience in coastal communities. The concept is to develop, test and optimise a modular toolbox that integrates expert knowledge, scientific information, multilevel stakeholder and community involvement, ecosystem service improvement analysis, cost-benefit analysis, priority of actions, and custom designed protocols for restoring and monitoring multiple coastal habitats. The toolbox framework will have common and specific tools that will be tested, optimised and demonstrated in five different ecosystems, across a latitudinal gradient of the Arctic-Atlantic basin, ranging from the high-Arctic Svalbard (79° N) in the North to the Madeira archipelago (33° N) in the South. The variety of environmental conditions and restoration needs of the five demonstration sites will provide different restoration scenarios with particular specificities in terms of biodiversity, pressures and threats, ecosystems services and stakeholders. The diversity in restoration scenarios will create a unique opportunity to develop a modular toolbox, that integrates common tools with tools that are specific for each restoration scenario into a collective framework. Ecosystem-specific innovations in nature-based solutions for habitat restoration that improve local climate resilience will also be developed, tested, and integrated into a general toolbox framework, establishing guidelines and innovative workflows. The toolbox and tools developed in each demonstration site, for different restoration scenarios, will be made available and tested for replication and upscaling in comparable ecosystems and similar communities, with particular emphasis in promoting stakeholder involvement.