Overcoming barriers and leveraging opportunities to scale up landscape‐scale restoration in Europe

Stepping up ecosystem restoration is critical to achieving pressing policy targets, but as well as significant benefits, there are also multiple challenges particularly associated with restoring at landscape scale. These relate to the complexity of ecosystems, land uses, and social factors within a landscape and the scale at which sustainable funding and effective monitoring are required. Here we present a summary of discussions from a symposium at the Society for Ecological Restoration—Europe conference, addressing five key topics related to scaling up restoration in Europe: implementation, stakeholder engagement, local economies, financing, and monitoring. Common barriers include inflexible political systems and traditional conservation project thinking, as well as the complexities and time required to work effectively and sustainably across disciplines, sectors, and geographical boundaries. However, opportunities are identified in relation to innovative financing systems and monitoring technologies, the development of nature‐based economies, and the strength and sustainability that comes from effectively and deeply engaging a wide diversity of stakeholders. Capitalizing on these prospects could enable landscape‐scale ecosystem restoration to play a significant role in meeting global targets for nature, climate, and people.