Transformative living labs for restoring marine – and coastal ecosystems

Ecosystem restoration is vital for achieving socially desirable objectives, such as halting biodiversity loss, mitigating climate change, enhancing ecological resilience, and ensuring the welfare of future generations. Despite these critical benefits, restoration efforts often face significant challenges, including slow progress, limited scalability, high costs, and uncertain outcomes. The EU Horizon A-AAGORA project seeks to address these challenges by developing transformative living labs to demonstrate large-scale coastal ecosystem restoration. These efforts focus on reducing anthropogenic pressures, implementing ecosystem-based management, and employing nature-based restoration measures. Transformative living labs serve as collaborative spaces where citizens, governments, businesses, and researchers co-create solutions, test ideas through real-world experimentation, and engage in iterative learning and feedback processes. This paper presents insights from three transformative living labs, each addressing complex restoration challenges: 1) Coastal kelp ecosystem restoration: Regenerating kelp forest ecosystems and local fish stocks while halting the decline of seabird populations. 2) Community-Led Wetland Restoration: Empowering local communities to restore wetlands and enhance ecological resilience. 3)Ria de Aveiro Lagoon: Restoring seagrass meadows and reducing anthropogenic pressures to enhance biodiversity and climate resilience. These living labs were co-led by universities and end-users to ensure effective knowledge transfer and foster stronger connections between science and practice. The living lab cycle is structured into three key phases: Co-Designing Solutions: Engaging partners to collaboratively identify challenges and develop restoration strategies. Developing and Experimenting: Testing ideas through real-world applications. Co-Evaluating: Assessing the effectiveness of solutions for addressing restoration challenges and exploring opportunities for scaling. A critical component of this process involves understanding socio-ecological systems through participatory mapping, integrating Indigenous and local ecological knowledge, and brainstorming solutions that facilitate regenerations that benefit both people and nature. The project also emphasizes the importance of building trust and local capacity, engaging multiple levels of governance, and collaborating with industry partners to ensure scalability and long-term impact. Finally, the project introduces a digital blueprint designed to facilitate the application of the living lab cycle for ecosystem-based restoration and management. This blueprint serves as a practical guide for replicating and scaling restoration efforts in other places.