image: eLTER contributes the scientific backbone for long-term, scalable restoration strategies by upporting experimental and functional restoration studies.
Credit: Evgeni Dimitrov/eLTER
Desertification is accelerating under climate change, threatening biodiversity, food security, and human wellbeing across the Mediterranean Basin, southern Europe, and the Middle East. Water scarcity and land degradation reduce carbon sequestration, increase soil erosion, and undermine rural livelihoods, pushing many dryland ecosystems into long-term decline.
A new eLTER Policy Brief, Restoring Function, Reviving Resilience: Practical Solutions for Desert Ecosystem Recovery, highlights functional restoration as a practical, science-based strategy to rehabilitate degraded and desertified ecosystems where full ecological recovery is no longer feasible. Rather than attempting to reconstruct historical species composition, functional restoration focuses on re-establishing essential ecosystem functions such as water regulation, soil stability, and vegetation productivity.
Long-term observations from the Negev Desert show that ecological degradation is often driven by the breakdown of natural water redistribution processes. Healthy dryland ecosystems rely on source–sink networks that concentrate rainfall into water-enriched soil patches, sustaining vegetation and soil organisms. When these networks are disrupted, ecosystems lose their capacity for self-regulation and become trapped in a degraded state. Research demonstrates that rebuilding simple, water-retaining structures can restore these functional networks, reverse desertification trends, and recover vital ecosystem services.
The policy brief shows that functional restoration is scalable across arid and semi-arid regions and directly supports major policy frameworks, including the EU Green Deal, Nature Restoration Law, Common Agricultural Policy, UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. It calls for integrating functional restoration into European and national land-management strategies, aligning restoration finance with CAP and carbon-farming schemes, and strengthening research–policy interfaces.
Through long-term, interdisciplinary research, eLTER provides the scientific backbone needed to support functional restoration, linking local, field-based evidence with European and global policy processes. The findings underline that restoring how ecosystems function — not just what species they contain — is key to building resilience in Europe’s drylands understanding.