Restoration of wetland ecosystems

Wetland restoration can be operated through various practices and approaches. In some cases, restoration activities focus on reducing or halting disturbances to the ecosystem and to the species inhabiting it to allow their recovery through natural processes. In other cases, the recovery of ecosystem functions and services demands more laborious approaches involving the removal or modification of barriers such as dikes, levees, and dams to re-establish natural water flow, halting the drainage of wetlands, re-contouring the landscape to restore the wetland’s original topography and microhabitats, which is essential for proper water retention and distribution. Restoration can also involve the removal of invasive alien species, and planting and seeding of native wetland vegetation to accelerate the establishment of diverse plant communities.

Given the diversity and the context-specific nature of wetland restoration, a wealth of guidelines exists for specific implementation measures. The Conference of the Parties of the Ramsar Convention have agreed on principles and guidelines for wetland restoration that hold the potential to deliver great benefits for food security and livelihoods:

• Goal setting & planning
  • Clearly define restoration goals with consideration for food system outcomes such as sustainable agriculture, fisheries productivity, and food security.
  • Integrate ecosystem services that support food systems (e.g., water filtration for irrigation, flood mitigation for croplands, and habitat for fish and pollinators).
  • Mitigate risks to food systems by avoiding side effects like crop loss from flooding or increased vector-borne diseases.
  • Explore opportunities to link restoration efforts with voluntary carbon markets, leveraging carbon credits to provide income compensation and further incentivize sustainable food system outcomes.
• Ecological design & site considerations
  • Apply ecological engineering to restore hydrological regimes that support agroecological landscapes and maintain soil fertility.
  • Prioritize restoration strategies re-establishing ecosystem functions, which form the basis for regulating services (e.g., climate and water regulation), supporting (e.g., photosynthesis, soil, habitats) and provisioning services (e.g., timber, wild foods, freshwater, fodder).
• Catchment-based planning
  • Restore wetlands in ways that support upstream and downstream food production systems, including irrigation networks and floodplain agriculture.
  • Recognize the role of wetlands in maintaining groundwater recharge and surface water availability critical to agriculture and aquaculture.
• Traditional knowledge integration
  • Consider involvement of local communities not just as stakeholders but as active participants in planning and implementation as empowering communities through co-management arrangements can strengthen long-term stewardship and align ecological goals with local food security needs.
  • Embrace traditional land-use systems that have historically integrated wetland stewardship with food production (e.g., rice paddies, rotational grazing, sustainable wild harvesting).
  • Support agroecological knowledge that sustains both wetland ecosystems and community food security.
• Adaptive management
  • Adapt restoration approaches based on feedback from food system outcomes, such as changes in fish populations, crop yields, or water availability.
  • Monitor trade-offs between ecosystem restoration and agricultural productivity to ensure balance.
  • Promote paludiculture in peatlands as option for sustainable use.
• Awareness and behaviour change
  • Promote practices that reduce wetland degradation from agri- or aquaculture, such as stopping drainage, minimizing chemical runoff, avoiding over-extraction of water, and protecting buffer zones.
  • Build food system resilience through community education on sustainable wetland-based livelihoods.

The Principles and Guidelines for Wetland Restoration adopted by the Ramsar Convention lays out a set of key governance measures for wetland restoration:

• National programs & inventories
  • Include food system considerations (e.g., food provisioning potential, fishery recovery areas) in national inventories of wetlands suitable for restoration.
• Prioritization and policy integration
  • Align wetland restoration with national food and nutrition security strategies, rural development plans, and sustainable agricultural policies.
• Conservation before restoration
  • Protect wetlands that are critical to food systems, such as those supporting rice cultivation, artisanal fisheries, or traditional grazing, before considering restoration of degraded areas.
• Stakeholder involvement
  • Engage food producers, fisherfolk, indigenous harvesters, and women (who often manage household food and nutrition security) in decision-making and implementation.
• Stewardship and incentives
  • Design stewardship and incentive schemes that reward sustainable wetland-based food production and reduce harmful practices (e.g., draining wetlands for short-term crop gains).
  • Promote market access for sustainably harvested wetland products.
• Knowledge sharing
  • Document and share success stories where wetland restoration has improved food security, diversified livelihoods, or enhanced climate resilience.
• Community engagement
  • Empower communities to co-manage wetlands that support their food systems, ensuring access to traditional food sources and equitable benefit-sharing from restoration outcomes.

Key guides to support the successful restoration of wetland ecosystems can include:

Guides

Wetland ecosystem restoration can also help advance the targets of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), as well as those of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Climate change mitigation benefits

A briefing note from the Ramsar Conventions on Wetlands identifies that:

• Although wetlands occupy only approximately 6% of the Earth’s total land surface, their soil holds 35% or more of the estimated 1,500 gigatons of organic carbon that is stored in soil.
• Peatlands store twice as much carbon as global forests despite covering only 3% of land. Avoiding peatland fires prevents massive CO₂ releases.
• Coastal wetlands buffer storms and floods, reducing disaster-related emissions from infrastructure damage and post-disaster reconstruction.
• Inland wetlands regulate water cycles, mitigating droughts and temperature extremes that drive energy-intensive adaptation measures.
• Mangroves store about 1,130 tons of carbon per hectare in deep organic soils, with deposits persisting for millennia under stable hydrological conditions.
• Rewetting drained peatlands halts soil oxidation, immediately curbing CO₂ emissions from degraded sites while allowing vegetation to regenerate and restart carbon capture.
• Preventing coastal wetland conversion (e.g., mangroves to aquaculture) avoids releasing locked blue carbon and maintains ongoing sequestration.
• Biodiversity conservation in wetlands maintains ecosystem stability, ensuring long-term carbon storage functions remain resilient to climate shifts.

Climate change adaptation benefits

Wetland restoration can directly contribute to the following targets under the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience:

• Target 9a (Water & Sanitation): Restoration buffers against water scarcity, controls salinity, and reduces flood risks, supporting access to safe, affordable water. Wetlands retain and slowly release precipitation, stabilizing water supplies, recharging groundwater, and mitigating drought impacts.
• Target 9b (Food & Agriculture): Wetland restoration enhances climate-resilient food and agricultural production by supporting fisheries, aquaculture, and wet agriculture practices. Restored wetlands can increase sustainable and regenerative production, contributing to food security and nutrition for local communities.
• Target 9d (Ecosystems): Restoring wetlands conserves biodiversity, stabilizes shorelines, prevents erosion, and protects terrestrial, inland, marine, and coastal ecosystems from climate change. Restored wetlands provide refuges for species losing habitat, helping maintain ecological balance under climate stress.
• Target 9e (Infrastructure): Intact wetlands minimize damage to infrastructure by acting as natural buffers that absorb and store excess water from floods, storm surges, and heavy rainfall. They slow water flow and reduce flood velocity and severity, providing space for floodwaters to spread gradually. This lessens the impact on roads, buildings, and levees, while lowering costs associated with climate disasters and disruptions to local livelihoods.
• Target 9f (Livelihoods): Restored wetlands help buffer communities against extreme weather events by reducing storm surges, wave damage, floods, and shoreline erosion, thereby providing natural protection from intensifying climate-related disasters. Wetland restoration can help sustain local economies by providing livelihood opportunities through sustainable tourism, fisheries, and agriculture.

Biodiversity benefits

Wetlands restoration directly addresses multiple targets within the KM-GBF, particularly:

• Target 1 (Plan and Manage all Areas To Reduce Biodiversity Loss): Wetlands are biodiversity hotspots that support a disproportionately high diversity of life. A planned approach to wetland restoration is therefore essential to re-establish and re-connect ecosystems of high ecological integrity, helping to preserve these crucial habitats and the vast array of species that they house.
• Target 2 (Restore 30% of all Degraded Ecosystems): Wetlands restoration is explicitly included in the target to place 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland water, coastal, and marine ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030 to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity, and connectivity. Given the advanced state of degradation of wetland ecosystems and being agriculture among the main drivers, making progress toward the restoration target of the KM-GBF demands to also reduce the impacts of food production on wetland ecosystems and the integration of wetland restoration principles and practices into food production,
• Target 4 (Halt Species Extinction, Protect Genetic Diversity, and Manage Human-Wildlife Conflicts): Wetland restoration is crucial for halting species extinction as these ecosystems serve as critical habitats for numerous threatened species.
• Target 7 (Reduce Pollution to Levels That Are Not Harmful to Biodiversity): Rehabilitated wetlands serve as natural buffers and filtration systems that can significantly improve water quality in surrounding environments.
• Target 8 (Minimize the Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Build Resilience): Wetlands sequester large amounts of carbons, making their restoration a powerful nature-based solution for climate mitigation. Additionally, restored wetlands enhance climate resilience by reducing the impacts of climate-induced disasters such as floods, droughts, and sea-level rise, thereby protecting both biodiversity and human communities.
• Target 10 (Enhance Biodiversity and Sustainability on Agriculture, Aquaculture, Fisheries and Forestry): Wetlands support agricultural, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry by ecosystem functions and services regulation such as controlling pests, reducing flooding, recharging groundwater, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration. When managed sustainably, they can provide a source of water for crops and livestock and as habitat for rice production and aquaculture.
• Target 11 (Restore, Maintain and Enhance Nature’s Contributions to People): Wetland restoration enhances the provision of crucial ecosystem services including clean water, flood control, coastal protection, and fisheries productivity, benefiting both nature and people.
• Target 12 (Enhance Green Spaces and Urban Planning for Human Well-Being and Biodiversity): Green and blue spaces like wetlands can help improve health outcomes for urban populations and restoring urban wetlands or building new ones for the benefit of people and nature should be part of biodiversity plans.

Other sustainable development benefits

As outlined by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, wetland restoration can support the delivery of multiple SDGs, including:

• SDG 1 (No Poverty): Wetland restoration contributes to poverty alleviation by delivering essential ecosystem services that support the livelihoods and well-being of marginalized communities. They provide opportunities to livelihoods such as sustainable fisheries, agriculture, and eco-tourism, generating income and employment for local populations, as well as offering a reliable water source for agriculture and human consumption, especially during droughts. Additionally, wetlands provide protection against climate and disaster risks, preventing further hardship for vulnerable communities.
• SDG 2 (Zero Hunger): Wetlands help are crucial to food and water security. They support food production and store water for irrigation while being an essential source of easily accessible animal protein that contributes to a healthy diet, as well as maintaining ecosystem functions that support sustainable agriculture and healthy diets.
• SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation): Wetlands provide freshwater for human consumption and act as natural water storage and filtration systems through processes such as natural filtration, slow water release, wastewater treatment, and interconnected wetland networks. They remove nutrients, sediments, and pollutants as water passes through vegetation and soils, which significantly improves water quality before it enters groundwater or downstream surface waters.
• SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): Wetlands support more than a billion livelihoods worldwide through diverse activities and provide services of value to agriculture and industrial production, such as nutrient recycling, protection against flooding and water as well as promoting sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products. Thereby contributing to decent work and economic growth.
• SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure): Wetlands offer nature-based solutions for mitigating and adapting to climate disasters by serving as cost-effective natural infrastructure. They buffer against floods and storm surges, regulate water cycles, store carbon, enhance drought resilience, support biodiversity, and strengthen ecosystem health, all while providing a more affordable alternative to engineered infrastructure.
• SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Wetlands help reduce inequalities by providing equitable access to essential ecosystem services that benefit marginalized communities. Wetlands also promote community engagement as successful wetland management often involves community participation, thereby supporting social inclusion and cohesion.
• SDG 13 (Climate Action): Wetlands enhance climate resilience by reducing the impacts of climate-driven disasters and support mitigation through their ability to store large amounts of carbon. Peatlands and coastal marshes hold a significant share of the world’s organic carbon, helping curb greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to long-term climate goals.
• SDG 14 (Life below Water): Wetland restoration supports the protection of coastal ecosystems by providing habitat protection, flood and storm surge mitigation, water quality improvement, erosion control and shoreline stabilization. Coastal wetlands reduce the speed and height of storm surges and absorb floodwaters, lowering the risk of damage from extreme weather events and, mangroves and tidal marshes can reduce wave energy by 30–90% and coastal flooding by over 30%.
• SDG 15 (Life on Land): Wetland restoration is directly addressed under SDG 15, subgoal 15.1, which calls for the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services, highlighting wetlands as one of these environments.

The success of wetland restoration interventions and projects depend on their design and effective implementation which can be hindered by both technical and non-technical challenges, including:

• Vague goals and evaluation criteria: Many projects lack specific, measurable objectives, complicating progress assessment and leading to inconsistent outcomes.
• Insufficient monitoring: Short-term monitoring horizons and inconsistent data collection hinder adaptive management and long-term success verification.
• Funding and Cost Underestimation: Restoration costs are frequently miscalculated, with insufficient budgets allocated for long-term monitoring and adaptive management.
• Technical and knowledge gaps: Inadequate understanding of hydrology, soil dynamics, and regional ecosystem variability results in unsuitable site selection and design flaws.
• Altered landscapes: Urbanization, climate change, and invasive species disrupt hydrological connectivity, complicating restoration in degraded or fragmented areas.
• Legal and social conflicts: Unclear land rights, stakeholder disagreements, and weak enforcement frameworks can delay or derail restoration efforts.

These may also lead to negative externalities and trade-offs:

• Land-Use conflicts: Restoring wetlands may displace agricultural activities, reducing food production and livelihoods in the short-term, as seen in drained wetlands converted for farming.
• Ecosystem service trade-offs: Focusing on one function (e.g., water retention) may reduce others (e.g. agricultural productivity), creating conflicts between stakeholders.
• Short-Term ecosystem disruptions: Initial restoration phases can temporarily disrupt local biodiversity and water quality until systems stabilize.
• Secondary pollution risks: Mechanical and chemical restoration methods can generate sludge or introduce pollutants, offsetting ecological gains.

Following measures as part of comprehensive and holistic design of wetland restoration interventions can help reduce trade-offs and address challenges in their implementation:

• Use standardized, field-based measurements of key services (e.g., soil organic carbon, water permeability, plant diversity) to track progress and guide adaptive interventions.
• Plan budgets that account for the full restoration cycle, including post-restoration maintenance and monitoring.
• Incorporate ecosystem service valuation (e.g., carbon markets, flood mitigation benefits) to attract diverse funding sources and justify long-term investment in monitoring and adaptive management.
• Integrate climate adaptation and invasive species control into restoration planning to address ongoing environmental changes.
• Clarify land tenure and regulatory frameworks to support enforcement and equitable benefit sharing.
• Prioritize restoration scenarios that retain some agricultural function or use marginal lands (e.g. paludiculture), thereby reducing displacement and supporting local livelihoods.
• Monitor for temporary declines in biodiversity or water quality and adapt management as needed.
• Favour nature-based and low-impact restoration techniques (e.g., phytoremediation, microbial restoration, seed-based approaches) over mechanical or chemical methods.
• Regenerative aquaculture may become a valuable tool for ecosystem restoration and future wetland management, whereby carefully managed fish ponds provide various services for maintenance of biodiversity, generation of market goods, recreation and rural tourism. By harnessing innovative practices e.g. integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA), alongside sustainable feed alternatives like micro-algae and insect-based feeds, regenerative aquaculture can significantly to reduce ecological impacts while enhancing food security.

Effective assessment of wetland ecosystem restoration requires the integration of comprehensive monitoring methodologies, well-defined ecological indicators, and holistic evaluation frameworks to accurately track implementation progress and measure outcomes related to biodiversity conservation and climate resilience.

Indicators to monitor biodiversity outcomes

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to a comprehensive set of headline, component, and complementary indicators for tracking progress toward the targets of the KM-GBF. Some of these indicators could also be functional for monitoring the implementation of this policy option. These indicators are:

Tools to monitor biodiversity outcomes

Tools to monitor climate outcomes

The cost of wetland ecosystem restoration is highly context-dependent and ultimately shaped by a country’s specific needs, capacities, and risk landscape. Region-specific examples include:

• In the United States, wetland restoration ranges from about USD 170 to 6,100 per acre.
• A synthesis of 235 studies found the median cost for marine coastal restoration (including salt marshes, mangroves, seagrass, coral reefs, oyster reefs) was around USD 80,000/ha and 160,000 (2010 USD), with average costs much higher due to outliers.
• The average cost of restoring 1 hectare of wetland in 100 projects across Europe (1996–2019) was around USD 9,000 /ha, which, including the amortization rate of actions implemented to restore wetlands, implies an estimated average unit cost of wetland restoration of USD 200/ha.

Some key examples of the successful restoration of wetland ecosystems include:

• The Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project in the United Kingdom transformed former agricultural land into tidal wetlands, mudflats, and saltmarshes. This large-scale restoration created vital habitats for over 20,000 waterbirds, including species such as avocets, spoonbills, and Brent geese. The restored wetlands also serve as important nursery grounds for fish and invertebrates, strengthening local aquatic food webs. Besides biodiversity gains, the project provides natural flood defenses and contributes to carbon sequestration, illustrating how wetland restoration can simultaneously support ecological functions and protect agricultural and urban areas.
• In the Baltic region, the LIFE Marsh Meadows Project in Latvia and Lithuania restored fen mires by rewetting degraded peatlands, constructing ponds, removing invasive species, and reintroducing traditional grazing by cattle and horses. This integrated management approach has led to the recovery of rare and threatened species such as the fen orchid, bluethroat, and crested newt.
• The Hedwige-Prosper Polder Project on the Belgium–Netherlands border demonstrates the benefits of managed realignment and depolderisation. By breaching dikes and allowing tidal waters to reclaim former farmland, this project restores intertidal wetlands that support aquaculture and the cultivation of salt-tolerant crops. The renewed wetland acts as a natural buffer against flooding and creates new opportunities for harvesting fish and shellfish, thus contributing to local food security and livelihoods.
• In Senegal, over 100,000 villagers participated in restoring 80 million mangroves across the Casamance and Siné Saloum estuaries. This project, led by the NGO Océanium, resulted in a significant increase in fish and oyster stocks, directly supporting local diets and incomes. The restored mangroves also acted as barriers against saltwater intrusion, enabling the recovery of rice fields previously abandoned due to salinization. As a result, rice yields improved, and food security was strengthened for coastal communities.
• The Paludi-Pilot-project in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany (2021 to 2031) is a large-scale initiative focused on upscaling paludiculture on wet peatlands to produce renewable biomass while maintaining the peatland’s wet condition. The project includes establishing sites, managing paludiculture crops (e.g., wetland grasses), and monitoring carbon balances to demonstrate sustainable, climate-neutral peatland use in rewetted sites, and serves as a model for integrating peatland conservation with agricultural production.

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