Practical Solutions to Desertification: New eLTER Policy Brief
Desertification is accelerating under climate change, threatening biodiversity, food security, and human wellbeing in dryland regions. Across the Mediterranean Basin, southern Europe, and the Middle East, water scarcity and land degradation reduce carbon sequestration, increase erosion, and undermine rural livelihoods.
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.
Long-term observations from the Negev Desert show that ecological degradation often results from disrupted water redistribution processes, particularly the loss of source-sink networks that concentrate rainfall in water-enriched soil patches and sustain vegetation and soil biota. Once these functional networks are lost, ecosystems lose their capacity for self-regulation and become trapped in a degraded state.
Functional restoration focuses on re-establishing essential ecosystem functions - such as water regulation, soil stability, and vegetation productivity - rather than reconstructing historical species composition. Evidence from long-term research demonstrates that rebuilding water-retaining structures can reverse desertification trends and restore vital ecosystem services.
The approach is scalable across arid and semi-arid regions and supports key policy frameworks, including the EU Green Deal, Nature Restoration Law, Common Agricultural Policy, UNCCD, and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The policy brief 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 infrastructures like eLTER.
Through long-term, interdisciplinary research, eLTER provides the scientific backbone needed to support functional restoration and link local evidence to European and global policy processes.
Read the full eLTER Policy Brief.