Strategy

The successful implementation of NbS in freshwater restoration relies heavily on collaboration and coordination across sectors due to their interdependencies and shared reliance on healthy ecosystems. Each Sectoral Strategy highlights key connections with others, emphasizing the need for integrated approaches to overcome challenges and leverage opportunities for transformation.
Water supply and sanitation depends on cooperation with Agriculture, Peat Extraction, and Navigation to reduce pollution and ensure sustainable water resource management. Implementing NbS at a larger scale often involves changes in land use and water management practices, necessitating collaboration with private landowners, public authorities, and other stakeholders. For example, wetlands restored in agricultural areas can filter pollutants and improve water quality for WSS operations. Such coordination can be complex and take a long time, requiring clear mandates, coalition-building, and long-term commitments. Strengthening workforce capacity and ensuring easy access to tools, methodologies, and case studies are crucial for bridging knowledge gaps and facilitating effective NbS integration.
Briefing
The water sanitation and supply sector relies on clean water and recognises the importance of nature-based solutions for reducing their costs and improving sustainability of supply and treatment. To date, most of the focus has been on wastewater treatment with less focus on upstream protection of the drinking water supply using Mature-based Solutions. MERLIN is addressing how the water sanitation and supply sector can collaborate with upstream water managers restoring Europe’s peatlands, wetlands, riparian areas and floodplains to help maintain water supply whilst responding to the biodiversity and climate crises.
Roundtables
The MERLIN roundtables aim to build a Community of Practice linking the economic sector representatives with MERLIN scientific and implementation partners, MERLIN scientists meet the sector representatives three times during the four years of the project.
Roundtables 1: to understand the motivation and interest of sectors and the impact of nature restoration on the sectors.
Roundtables 2: to share examples of river restorations and their impacts on the sectors; to focus on the MERLIN cases and to discuss pro and contra arguments; to extend the number of involved stakeholders. Introduce cross-sectoral discussions, discuss policy levers and sectoral cooperation opportunities.
Roundtables 3: to discuss sectoral strategies including value chain impacts and cross sectoral needs to ensure MERLIN outputs speak to the sector.
Roundtable 1

The Water supply & Sanitation roundtable was held on March 07, 2022, organized by WWF together with The James Hutton Institute. Besides the MERLIN team (JHI and WWF), following organisations participated: Aquafed and Aqualia, representing the views of private operators, and Aqua Publica Europea, the European association of public water operators. A meeting with a representative from the European Water Managers Association (EUWMA) was held separately.
Roundtable 2

The 2nd Water supply and Sanitation Sector Roundtable brought 17 experts together from the public and private sectors and NGOs, to discuss the challenges and benefits of upstream freshwater restoration using large-scale NbS. The lack of data and capacity for NbS application has been highlighted as an significant constraint, whereas establishing partnerships with other stakeholders, such as the insurance sector or municipalities were mentioned as a good way forward. With clearer data on NbS benefits and more collaboration, private and public funding can better be attracted as well.
Roundtable 3

The third and final water sector roundtable of the MERLIN project, building upon the work and feedback from previous sessions, convened experts to analyse challenges preventing a greater uptake of NbS in the sector. The insightful discussions that resulted from this and past roundtables will be used to feed into a strategy for the water sector containing actions to tackle these challenges.