Review on ecosystem restoration and its effectiveness in Europe - ETC/BD Technical paper N°1/2012

This document reviews some definitions and concepts which support the understanding of ecosystem restoration in Europe. It demonstrates that the knowledge on actions and effectiveness of restoration in Europe is low or scattered. Results from contracts supported by the European Commission´s DG Environment should help to have a better vision at EU level. Evaluation of ecosystem restoration success is still a weak part of all these programmes due to complexity of the issues: therefore, it is not easy to develop generally applicable indicators for that purpose. This preliminary overview should help discussion on the implementation and the measure of the EU target 2 which aims to restore at least 15% of degraded ecosystems in the EU.

Prepared by: Lenka Jandová, Michael Hošek and Jan Plesník (from ETC/BD partner AOPK, CZ), Sophie Condé (from ETC/BD-MNHN, FR)