Policy Barriers in Seascape Restoration

Advancing Restoration Knowledge

Identifying solutions to enable large-scale marine and coastal recovery.

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Project context

Marine restoration is essential to tackling the biodiversity and climate crises. At COP15, governments pledged to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, highlighting the need for large-scale, connected restoration across marine and coastal ecosystems. Yet most restoration remains small in scale and focused on single habitats.

Complex policy and regulatory systems often hold projects back. Licensing rules and feature-based designations can overlook ecological connectivity and ecosystem-wide recovery, making it difficult to plan and deliver seascape-scale restoration.

This project is bringing together practitioners, regulators and policy experts to identify barriers and design practical solutions that make large-scale marine restoration possible.

What the project will do

A new policy steering committee is being established to bring together governments, regulators and statutory nature conservation bodies. The group will identify policy barriers to seascape restoration and develop strategies to address them.

Evidence from past initiatives will be compiled into a master database, supported by interviews with restoration practitioners. Findings will be shared through a report that highlights key policy challenges and includes real-world case studies from the UK and Europe.

These insights will inform a roadmap of agreed recommendations for overcoming barriers, supported by government representatives and ministers. The project aims to strengthen collaboration between practitioners and policymakers, helping to create enabling conditions for restoration at scale and contributing to the global goal of protecting and restoring 30% of the ocean by 2030.

Outputs

Policy report: marine restoration

Restoration policy is limiting marine restoration. This report, shows how these constraints affect delivery, and presents sector wide evidence that the current system does not operate proportionately for restoration projects. It then outlines a structured and legally grounded programme of reforms aimed at supporting ecological recovery, improving consistency and efficiency, and enabling restoration.