Understanding the full impacts of nature restoration requires more than measuring individual ecological outcomes. NatuRISE will connect data, modelling, integrated assessment and decision-support to help decision-makers understand restoration benefits, costs and trade-offs across places, sectors and groups.
Nature restoration can deliver a wide range of benefits for biodiversity, ecosystems, climate and people. However, understanding the full implications of restoration choices is complex. Benefits and costs may occur in different places, emerge at different times and affect people and economic sectors in different ways.
For policymakers, regional and local authorities, land and forest managers, and conservation practitioners, this creates a practical challenge: how can different restoration options be compared when their ecological, economic and societal effects are interconnected?
NatuRISE – Nature Restoration Impact Assessment for Socio-Economic and Ecological Benefits will address this challenge by connecting different sources of evidence and analytical approaches in a coherent assessment process.
Four steps towards a more complete picture
NatuRISE will bring together four connected elements to build a stronger understanding of restoration impacts and make the resulting evidence more useful for decision-making.
1. Data and indicators: establishing the evidence base
Assessing restoration impacts starts with relevant data and indicators. NatuRISE will develop and bring together evidence to capture ecosystem services, restoration impacts and how benefits and costs are distributed.
This evidence base will help address questions about which impacts can be assessed, where they occur and which ecological and socio-economic dimensions need to be considered.
2. Modelling and valuation: understanding benefits, costs and interactions
Data alone cannot show how restoration choices may affect wider systems. NatuRISE will use ecological, land-use and socio-economic modelling, alongside valuation approaches, to investigate the effects of different restoration options.
This work will help examine how impacts interact, where benefits and costs may arise, and how outcomes can vary across scenarios and contexts.
3. Integrated assessment: connecting impacts across places and groups
Restoration outcomes are interconnected. An intervention can affect ecosystems, land use, economic activities and communities, with implications that extend beyond the location where restoration takes place.
NatuRISE will connect different analytical perspectives through integrated assessments at the European scale and four case studies. This will help investigate potential synergies and trade-offs, including how benefits and costs may be distributed across places, sectors and groups of people.
4. Decision support: making evidence useful for choices
Evidence becomes more useful when decision-makers can apply it to the choices they face. NatuRISE will develop a decision-support tool to help users compare restoration options and explore their wider implications.
The tool will combine cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria analysis, supporting consideration of different types of evidence and assessment criteria. Stakeholders will contribute to the tool’s development and testing, helping connect its functionality with real-world decision contexts.
Connecting science with restoration decisions
The four steps form a connected pathway: data and indicators inform modelling and valuation; these analyses feed into integrated assessments; and the resulting evidence supports comparison of restoration options.
Stakeholder knowledge is an important part of this process. Through activities such as workshops, interviews, co-creation and tool testing, NatuRISE will engage policymakers, practitioners, land and forest managers, researchers and civil society in shaping and assessing the project’s outputs.
NatuRISE does not directly implement restoration measures. Its contribution is to strengthen the evidence and decision-support available to those responsible for restoration policy, planning and implementation.
By connecting ecological, economic and societal perspectives, the project aims to help users better understand restoration benefits and costs, identify trade-offs and distributional effects, and make better-informed decisions about restoration pathways.
The longer-term ambition is to contribute to more effective and equitable implementation of nature restoration across Europe.
Read more about our research approach
Explore how NatuRISE will connect data, modelling, integrated impact assessment and stakeholder knowledge to develop decision-support for nature restoration.
Read more about our research approach and decision-support
Related news
- NatuRISE launches to reveal the full benefits of nature restoration — the project’s ambition, approach and expected contribution. Read the launch press release.
- Nature restoration can deliver much more than biodiversity gains. But can we see the full picture? — why restoration decisions need to account for wider ecological, economic and societal impacts.
- Nature restoration does not happen in isolation — how impacts can interact across places, sectors and groups.