CLIMAREST

Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin

CLIMAREST is a Mission Ocean project under the Atlantic-Arctic Lighthouse.

CLIMAREST explores the potential of restoration actions in various coastal areas on an Arctic-Atlantic scale, and particular attention will be paid to the most fragile and vulnerable habitats, such as Arctic oligotrophic coastal areas, seagrass meadows, shallow-water rocky bottoms, oyster reefs, and soft bed benthic habitats – all of which are connected by the coastal context in which they exist, their sensitivity to disturbance and their general role as major drivers of habitat complexity and foundations of biodiversity in the ocean. The development, testing, evaluation and presentation of a generalizable framework that emerges from this work will provide a template for more efficient and effective restoration of degraded coastal habitats from the Arctic to the Atlantic.

Upscaling and integration are two dimensions of particular importance. CLIMAREST brings these two dimensions into the development of tools and protocols, making them available for local, national and regional policymakers so they can be further integrated into management practices. CLIMAREST therefore develops effective economic, social, political and cultural standards for marine and coastal ecosystem restoration and increased climate resilience in the Arctic-Atlantic basin. CLIMAREST aims to achieve these objectives by developing and delivering a holistic toolbox for ecosystem restoration and coastal climate resilience to identify synergies between various solutions in practice and under consideration. Once implemented, this toolbox will include tools for multilevel stakeholder and community involvement and co-production of knowledge, ecosystem-service improvement analysis, cost-benefit analysis, priority of actions and protocols for restoration and monitoring of the restored systems in a broadly applicable framework.

The Digital Toolbox for CLIMAREST will develop an online decision-support toolkit for marine restoration. The underlying presumption of this tool is that the management and restoration of Arctic-Atlantic areas must rely on sound decisions based on different types of knowledge, democratic processes and shared experiences. The involvement from a large range of stakeholders will be a part of such decisions, and CLIMAREST will develop improved tools to integrate this into guidelines for future management involving stakeholders across various levels of interest and power. The concretization of overall goals for restoration into targets and specific indicators for evaluation of the restoration outcome will be part of these tools, and the need for, and combination of, quantitative, semi-quantitative and qualitative indicators to evaluate different aspects of the restoration outcome will be explored and integrated into the tool.