The European Union adopted in 2024 a law imposing the restoration of at least 30% of all habitats in poor condition—forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes and other ecosystems covered by the regulation—by 2030, but harmonized data on the actual state of these ecosystems remain rare at the continental scale. A study published in Nature in July 2026 shows that it is difficult to target sites that combine the most benefits for water, climate and biodiversity, due to insufficient baseline mapping.
The Essentials
- The European nature restoration law requires restoring at least 30% of all habitats in poor condition (forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, etc.) by 2030, but harmonized data on their condition remain rare at the continental scale.
- Common mapping of wetlands would allow targeting sites that simultaneously deliver climate, hydrological and biological services, according to a Nature study (July 2026).
- The lack of European ecological data infrastructure risks dispersing funding and preventing measurement of the actual effect of restoration efforts.
- The combination of field surveys and satellite remote sensing offers a realistic path to fill this information deficit before 2030.
- By 2050, the trajectory depends on a collective choice: either comparable methods direct funding toward the most effective sites, or divergent national approaches dilute the effort.
Europe Has Set a Restoration Target Without Yet Being Able to Measure It
The nature restoration law, adopted by the European Union in 2024 after a tense legislative process, is one of the most ambitious environmental texts Brussels has ever produced. It sets quantified targets for a dozen types of ecosystems, with wetlands occupying a central place. Peatlands, coastal marshes, flood meadows, riparian forests: these environments combine functions that took decades to appreciate at their true value. They store carbon in their water-saturated soils, purify groundwater, dampen flooding and host biodiversity disproportionate to their surface area.
Europe does not yet have a coherent map of its wetlands at the continental scale. National inventories exist, but their methods, their definition thresholds and their state indicators vary enough to make any direct comparison risky. The European Commission can announce a 30% target, but it cannot yet specify 30% of what, measured how, with what expected results.
The study published in Nature in July 2026 documents this gap and proposes an architecture to fill it. It starts from the observation that ecological restoration, to be effective, requires knowing where degraded sites are located, what condition they are in, and what benefits their restoration could deliver. Without this information, funding is allocated according to political or administrative criteria rather than ecological ones, and results remain unverifiable.
Wetlands Are Rare and Multifunctional
Wetlands cover approximately 5 to 8% of the world’s land surface according to the definitions used, but they store between 20 and 30% of organic carbon in soils. In Europe, estimates converge on a loss of more than half of wetland area since the middle of the twentieth century, principally through agricultural drainage, urbanization and river damming. This decline was so rapid that it far outpaces systematic inventories: we measure today a degraded state without always knowing the reference state.
This functional density is precisely what makes these environments strategic. A restored peatland does not provide a single service: it halts the oxidation of peat, which releases CO₂ and methane when it dries; it reconstitutes a filter for agricultural nitrates; it dampens river discharge by retaining water during intense rainfall episodes. Three distinct problems, one investment. This is the central argument of the so-called “multifunctional sites” approach that the Nature study puts forward: by prioritizing wetlands that combine multiple benefits, Member States could achieve ecological performance significantly higher than that of restoration scattered across randomly chosen sites or according to land availability.
Researcher Hannah Ritchie, whose work on environmental data invites moving away from catastrophism by relying on precise and comparable measurements, illustrates the logic at work here well. Her argument is that environmental problems become solvable once they are documented rigorously: it is data that opens the path to targeted action. Applied to wetlands, this argument suggests that the main obstacle to European restoration is the absence of an information infrastructure that permits allocating effort where it matters.
Field Surveys and Satellites: A Combination That Changes the Scale of What’s Possible
The technical obstacle is not insurmountable. It requires methodological choices and investments, but the tools exist. Satellite remote sensing has transformed the capacity to map wetlands at large scale. Radar sensors, particularly the Sentinel missions of the European Copernicus program, make it possible to detect the presence of open water and water-saturated soils under vegetation cover, even in cloudy conditions. Optical sensors complement this picture by characterizing vegetation, whose composition reflects the hydrological condition of the environment.
These satellite data do have well-documented limitations. They struggle to distinguish types of hygrophilic vegetation with the precision necessary for detailed ecological assessment, and they do not directly inform on water quality, soil structure or the presence of key species. This is where field surveys come in, allowing calibration and validation of maps derived from remote sensing. The combination of the two approaches, often called “ground truth” in remote sensing literature, is today considered the only realistic way to produce mappings that are both complete and reliable at the continental scale.
The Copernicus program, managed by the European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency, provides a solid technological foundation. The issue is more organizational: common protocols are needed so that field surveys conducted in Poland, Spain or Finland produce comparable data. Several European scientific initiatives are working in this direction, particularly within the Horizon Europe research program. But the transition from these academic efforts to an operational monitoring infrastructure accessible to administrations and site managers remains to be accomplished.
This gap between scientific capacity and administrative operationalization echoes an analogous challenge observed in other domains of data-driven public policy. Agricultural automation has shown that technological tools deployed without adapted institutional infrastructure produce unevenly distributed effects. Ecological mapping risks the same pitfall if the data produced remain in academic publications rather than feeding into Member States’ management plans.
Funding Searches for Its Targets
The nature restoration law is accompanied by financial instruments. Several European funds are mobilized to direct credit toward restoration projects, drawing on a significant share of existing budgets. The common agricultural policy provides eco-regimes and agro-environmental measures that can compensate farmers for practices favorable to wetlands, such as maintaining wet meadows or reducing drainage. The older LIFE fund finances conservation and restoration projects on a demonstration basis.
These instruments exist, but their targeting remains largely approximate. A farmer who receives aid to maintain a wet meadow in a region where wetlands are still in good condition contributes less to the 30% target than a landowner who restores a drained peatland in a region where these environments have nearly disappeared. Without common mapping of degradation and the potential value of sites, it is difficult to distinguish between these two cases and direct aid accordingly.
Economist Dani Rodrik, whose work on industrial policy emphasizes the necessity for rigorous selection of supported projects and continuous evaluation of results, illuminates this point in a useful way. Rodrik argues that public subsidies produce lasting effects only when accompanied by performance discipline: beneficiaries must account for what they have accomplished, and programs that do not work must be able to be reoriented. Applied to wetland restoration, this logic leads to requiring, before any funding, a documented baseline state and, afterward, measurable indicators of ecological recovery. The absence of common mapping makes this discipline nearly impossible to exercise at the European scale.
By 2030, Two Trajectories Take Shape
The question that structures the debate between researchers and decision-makers concerns the convergence of Member States toward comparable methods before restoration funding is massively committed.
The first scenario is one of common monitoring: the European Commission, supported by Copernicus data and a network of harmonized ground stations, produces by 2027 or 2028 a continental map of wetlands classified by degradation state and by potential for multifunctional restoration. Member States use this map to guide their national restoration plans, and European funding is conditioned on demonstration that selected sites are among those with the highest ecological benefit. By 2035, it becomes possible to measure at the continental scale how much carbon has been sequestered, how water quality has evolved in the affected watersheds, and which species have regained ground. This scenario requires administrative coordination that the European Union has demonstrated its capacity to organize in other domains, notably air quality monitoring and waste tracking.
The second scenario is one of dispersed results. Each Member State develops its own inventory methods, its own indicators and its own criteria for site selection. Funding is committed quickly, which responds to political pressures, but it disperses across sites chosen for their administrative accessibility rather than their ecological value. By 2030, Europe can announce that funds have been spent and hectares have been declared restored, without being able to demonstrate that these restorations have produced the expected benefits for carbon, water and biodiversity. This scenario is, for now, the most likely if no decision is made quickly on data standards.
The signals to monitor to distinguish between these trajectories are precise. The share of restoration programs that rely on monitoring methods comparable at the European scale is the most direct indicator. The existence or absence of a common reporting system among Member States, integrated in the national restoration plans that the law requires them to submit to the Commission, will constitute a strong signal by 2026 or 2027. Finally, the measured evolution of water levels, carbon storage and species richness on the first restored sites will allow judging whether investments produce expected results or whether restoration remains essentially administrative.
Early Restoration Programs: First Lessons
Several European countries have accumulated significant experience in wetland restoration, which allows feeding the debate with concrete data rather than projections. The Netherlands, which has lost considerable peatland area to agriculture and urbanization on land reclaimed from the sea, has been conducting rehumidification programs for peatlands, called “paludiculture,” for several years, which allow maintaining agricultural production while halting CO₂ emissions from peat oxidation. Germany, whose degraded peatlands represent approximately 7.5% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, has undertaken rewetting programs in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with documented results on emissions reduction.
These national experiences have produced useful data, but they also illustrate the comparability problem. Methods for measuring CO₂ emissions before and after rehumidification vary according to teams and field equipment. The results are therefore real but difficult to aggregate at the European scale to produce a common accounting. This is precisely the deficit that the Nature study seeks to fill by proposing a methodological framework that could serve as a common reference.
Finland and Sweden have among Europe’s most complete national inventories of wetlands, fed by decades of systematic mapping. Their experience shows that a national ecological data infrastructure is entirely accessible to states with capable administration, and that the marginal cost of updating these inventories, once the infrastructure is in place, is modest compared to the value of decisions it allows to inform.
The true European challenge consists in transferring this experience from the best-equipped countries to those starting from further back, particularly in the Mediterranean basin and Central and Eastern Europe. These regions concentrate high biodiversity and wetlands subject to increasing pressures from droughts and intensive agriculture, but their inventory and monitoring capacities are often more limited. The logic of common European monitoring is also one of methodological solidarity: countries that know how transmit their protocols to those still building their capacity.
The European nature restoration regulation has created a legal obligation. It remains to give it the eyes it needs to see where to act first.
Sources
- Main study, Nature, mapping of wetlands and restoration priorities, July 2026
- Regulation (EU) on nature restoration, Official Journal of the European Union, 2024, EUR-Lex
- Copernicus Program of the European Space Agency, copernicus.eu
- German Federal Ministry for the Environment, data on emissions from degraded peatlands, bmuv.de
- NRL Law - European Parliament (adoption February 2024)
- NRL Regulation - Council of the EU (adoption June 2024)
- Degraded peatlands Germany - 7.5% of GHG
- Wetlands - 20-30% organic carbon in soils (Nature Communications)
- Loss of wetlands Europe - 300 years (Fluet-Chouinard et al., Nature 2023)
- Copernicus - governance (European Commission)
- CAP - BCAE2 wetlands and eco-regimes