Inspiration for restoration has built on optimism that humans can reverse past management failures and turn ecological losses into gains that provide hope for a sustainable future. Ecological restoration can secure local access to the ecosystem goods and services on which economies depend whilst fostering collaboration, community bonding, and human well-being. However, restoration is often undervalued by society and science. It is criticized for being too small and expensive to be effective, operating at scales mismatched to the scale of damage (McAfee et al. 2021) What you just read is part of the introduction to the paper recently published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution ‘Valuing marine restoration beyond the ‘too small and too expensive’ , in there the authors highlight the major challenges still facing restoration.
One of which being that sometimes, restoration is just a temporary patch up for a hole that keeps on getting bigger. Like if you slashed a tyre and try inflate it with a pump, it will only keep you going for a few kilometres at most. You must change the tyre, not add air. Or like if you were putting a bandaid on a major cut that would require some stitches instead. They make the example of coral reefs: restoration is a good plan, but only if included within a climate change management scenario. Similarly, restoration of saltmarshes, e.g. in the Venice lagoon where I am working now, cannot occur without a better management of the dredging of canals, which will include consideration for the sediment budget and the hydrodynamics. Remember when i talked about ‘holistic approaches’ to restoration? Restoration is only good if all of the species and their interactions are taken into account. Scale is also important, and yes, small scales ‘pilots’ are important, BUT everything (or at least, most) in ecology is very ‘context specific’ . This means, it is important to study things in a wider context, with multiple studies, cross countries collaborations. And then, once the basic principle are understood, go ahead with large restoration. Of course, this may be ‘expensive’. but does it have to be? Perhaps, if you leave it to the scientists to organise (we are good at ecology, maybe even versatile with some project management experience, but navigating bureocracy of sub-contracting can drive us mad and we may make the wrong choices), but what if every management plan included some restorative aspect? Imagine that new park the council is designing, it wouldn’t take that much for them to do it in a restorative way from the beginning, rather than having to add interventions later. What if the permission to build that set of houses in the border of an area with a ‘rare’ habitat aren’t given in the first place? What if the ‘morphological’ interventions in the lagoon are designed again instead of relying on a 30 plus years old plan which is no longer scientifically valid and was never updated given new information? what if restoration could be included within food production settings, so that also one can eat sustainably? restoration doesn’t have to equate small and expensive, and more effort should be made to shift this perspective and come up with large scale cheaper plans to restore our ecosystem.. what baseline to choose is then another issue... .
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