It’s World Oceans Day!
Today is a reminder that healthy oceans depend on healthy coastlines, and that restoring them requires both ambition and concrete action.
Across Europe, NbS projects are working to bring nature back to degraded coastal environments, showing how it is possible to reverse long-term environmental decline while building resilience for the communities that live alongside the sea. This year's theme, Reimagine, resonates with what many of these projects are already doing: rethinking how we manage coasts, and what we owe to the ecosystems that sustain us.
Within the NetworkNature community, a dedicated cluster of EU-funded projects is generating knowledge and practice at the frontier of marine and coastal NbS. REST-COAST is one such example. The project, which just ended, worked across some of Europe's most pressured coastal regions, and has developed tools and approaches to restore coastal ecosystems that have suffered decades of degradation. Another EU-funded project, DuneFront, is testing hybrid nature-based solutions that combine natural dunes with existing coastal infrastructure across twelve demonstration sites.
Ocean's health doesn't start at the coast. It starts upstream, in cities, in forests, in the soil. Across Europe, projects working on rivers, wetlands, and urban green infrastructure are all, in some way, part of it.
Happy World Oceans Day.
