In March 2026, MERLIN scientific coordinator Daniel Hering stood before a Brussels room full of European policymakers and set out what four years of freshwater restoration had found. The evidence is clear, the tools are ready, the Nature Restoration Regulation is now law. The question is whether the will – political, institutional, financial – can match the ambition.

A few days later, we joined MERLIN project coordinator Sebastian Birk and Ellis Penning – who coordinates the SpongeScapes project and helped moderate the Brussels event – on the banks of restored streams in Belgium's Scheldt catchment. Away from the conference rooms and presentation slides, the conversation took a different shape, rooted in a landscape that is slowly and visibly recovering.

This final episode moves between those two worlds – the formal and the reflective, the policy stage and the riverbank. Between them, it captures something of what this landmark project has achieved, and what the freshwaters it set out to restore still need.

The Nature Restoration Regulation is now European law. National Restoration Plans are being written. The targets are set. So why does transformative, large-scale ecological restoration remain so stubbornly difficult to achieve, and what would it actually take to make it happen everywhere, not just in flagship protected areas?

That question sat at the heart of a panel discussion held in Brussels in March 2026, at a joint event bringing together the EU Horizon projects MERLIN, WaterLANDS, SpongeScapes and SpongeWorks. Moderated by Ellis Penning of SpongeScapes, the panel brought together Anders Iversen and Willem Jan Goossen from the European Commission, Craig Bullock of WaterLANDS, and Sebastian Birk, coordinator of MERLIN, fresh from four years overseeing freshwater restoration work across 18 sites in very different corners of Europe.

In this episode we tune into that conversation, ranging across governance, finance, agricultural and environmental policy, and the challenge of building the kind of shared ecological literacy that makes transformative change possible. It is a candid, reflective and ultimately hopeful discussion, held at a moment when the tools and evidence for restoration have never been better, and the pressure to act has never been greater.

Freshwater restoration should be at the heart of how farming is managed in Europe, according to new recommendations.

Reshaping the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to support freshwater ecosystems by encouraging water-friendly farming practices is a key task, accoring to a team of researchers from the EU MERLIN project writing in a newly published policy brief. The researchers draw on cutting-edge science and fieldwork to outline a vision for water-resilient agricultural landscapes across Europe.

Our guest is one of those researchers – Josselin Rouillard from ECOLOGIC – and in this podcast we’ll hear about how the futures of European freshwaters and farming are so closely linked, and what we can do to help them flourish.