Determining whether an initiative or project is successful requires an understanding the original conditions, the context in various goals, pressures, achievements and context. For example, success of a restoration project may be measured in terms of:
- Achieving project goals
- Meeting local stakeholder expectations
- Improving environmental factors (species conservation, hydrological conditions, etc.)
- Addressing social and economic factors,
- Supporting policy goals
- Achieving regulatory compliance, etc.
These all can be measured through different metrics, where most metrics target one or more of the goals. For measuring overall success, one must acknowledge that there are always trade-offs, often between conservation targets and economic factors. Every project must recognise and define how it sets this balance.
While some metrics may improve, others may become worse. Whether the overall impact is labelled a success will depend upon the site specific conditions, and often, hindsight.
EcoAdvance focuses on improving the roll out and success of freshwater restoration projects in general. We achieve this through providing two main deliverables:
- Showcases
- The Prone2Sucess checklist
Both these items share recommendations, priorities and lessons learnt drawn from past experiences to guide the focus for future project actions.
The Prone2Success checklist provides a list of the key issues / actions that have been found to be significant These are primarily based upon a review of publications and our online survey, then refined by the experiences and advice from the showcase interviewees.
The Showcases feature real people who have undertaken a range of restoration project roles across the European area over their careers and, in their own words, highlight their recommendations on how to make restoration projects successful.
Restoration or Rehabilitation?
The phrase river restoration has been used in both the context of trying to restore a river back to its ‘original’ conditions, or simply in reference to rehabilitating the river by addressing particular issues such as invasive species, channel bed degradation, canalisation, pollution etc.
In trying to return a river to its ‘original’ conditions, the immediate question arises as to what is meant by ‘original’; in many contexts the intention is actually to rehabilitate. A further challenge that influences the restoration process is climate change. With the effects of climate change becoming more noticeable, often with rainfall and temperature extremes becoming more extreme, the challenge for restoration becomes how best to rehabilitate the river in a manner that is also sustainable under the future climate predictions.
Restoration or rehabilitation, EcoAdvance shares practical experience from people involved in these projects.