Why wetland restoration matters
Wetlands are not impressive to look at. They have neither the scale of a mountain nor the obvious beauty of a forest. A shallow lake with reeds along its edge tends to read as something between landscape and wasteland — a place that “does nothing”.
The opposite is true. Wetlands are the most productive ecosystems on the continent. They are also the ones disappearing fastest.
Since 1970 the world has lost more than 400 million hectares of wetlands — an area comparable to almost twice the territory of the European Union. Close to a quarter of what remains is in a degraded state. No other ecosystem is contracting at this rate.
Here is why that matters, and why protection on its own is no longer enough.
What a wetland actually does
It helps to think of a wetland not as scenery but as infrastructure. It performs several jobs at once, each of which would otherwise cost money.
It purifies water. Water that enters a shallow lake leaves it cleaner. Vegetation and sediments retain nitrogen, phosphorus and heavy metals — a process that in a treatment plant requires equipment, energy and maintenance. Here it happens free of charge, for as long as the system is healthy.
It absorbs shocks. In heavy rain a wetland works like a sponge: it takes the water up, slows it down and releases it gradually. A drained wetland does the reverse — it passes everything downstream at once. Much of the urban flooding of recent years has a longer prehistory than it appears, and that history often begins with a drained marsh further up the catchment.
It stores carbon. Wet soils hold carbon far more effectively than dry ones, because standing water halts the decomposition of organic matter. This has a flip side: a drained wetland does not merely stop absorbing — it begins to release the carbon it has accumulated. Drainage turns a sink into a source.
It provides shelter. Wetlands occupy a negligible share of the land surface, yet they support a disproportionate share of biodiversity. At Lake Vaya, for instance, more than 260 bird species have been recorded — close to half of all species found in Bulgaria, on a single lake.
These four functions work together and are lost together. That is what makes their loss so expensive.
Why protection is no longer enough
For a long time nature conservation was conceived as guarding: you fence off what is valuable and you do not allow it to be damaged. The logic holds for as long as there is something left to fence off.
The problem is that most of the damage has already been done. According to the European Environment Agency, 81 % of habitat assessments in the Union are in unfavourable or bad condition. In four cases out of five, in other words, we are not talking about something that needs to be protected — we are talking about something that is already broken.
And guarding a damaged ecosystem does not repair it. If the water regime has been disrupted, a building ban will not bring the water back. If the reed beds are gone, supervision will not plant them. Protection holds the line; it does not improve it.
This is precisely why the European Union adopted the Nature Restoration Regulation in 2024 — an obligation on Member States to put restoration measures in place across at least 20 % of land and sea areas by 2030, and across all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050. Separate, specific deadlines apply to drained peatlands in agricultural use.
That is a change of thinking, not merely of policy. From “do not let it get worse” to “bring it back”.
Restoration is concrete work, not a position
This is where words easily slip. “Restoration” sounds like something one declares. In reality it is a sequence of very specific decisions on the ground.
Our work in the Vaya Eco-Park began with a degraded stretch of land — the result of decades of commercial use followed by looting and dumping, of plastic car parts and tyres, which had disrupted the water regime and impoverished the habitats. Restoration meant essentially one thing: return the water to where it belongs, and then step back.
This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive part. Restoration is not gardening. You do not plant an ecosystem. You restore the conditions — the hydrology, the terrain, the connections between water bodies — and then the vegetation and the animals return on their own, if the conditions are right. The result in our case is close to 100 hectares of functioning wetland habitat that is self-sustaining today.
A few things we learned along the way and had not anticipated:
Restoration takes years, not seasons. The first two years look like nothing at all. Only afterwards does the system begin to behave like a system.
Nature does not return on schedule. Species arrive that you did not expect, and species you were sure of are slow to appear. That is a sign the process is genuine rather than decorative.
And most importantly: restoration without measurement is a good intention. This is why, for two years now, we have been carrying out monthly field surveys combined with a ten-year satellite analysis, in order to establish how much carbon different types of restored land actually capture. The difference between “we think it helps” and “we measured how much” is the difference between a campaign and science.
A contradiction worth knowing about
There is something paradoxical in the way the system treats restoration.
An organisation restoring a wetland inside a protected site goes through the same procedural sequence as a developer whose project may cause harm. A project to return a water regime or to manage reed beds pursues exactly the objectives for which the site was designated — and still it often follows a path comparable to that of an infrastructure development.
The result is that procedures make the activities which improve the state of nature more expensive and slower. This is not ill will but oversight: the rules were written to stop harm, and did not anticipate that someone would arrive with the opposite intention.
We consider this one of the corrections that deserve to be made — and we raise it wherever we have the opportunity to raise it.
Why this is a local subject, not only a global one
It is easy for these conversations to remain abstract. For Burgas they are not.
The Burgas Lakes complex is one of the most significant wetland systems in Europe and a key point on the Via Pontica migratory flyway — the corridor along which tens of thousands of birds pass every autumn and spring. Lake Vaya carries five separate protective designations, accumulated over close to three decades: protected site, CORINE site, Ramsar site, Important Bird Area and Natura 2000 site.
But designation is paper. It registers the value; it does not maintain it.
The value is maintained by the state of the water, by whether the reeds are there, by whether the birds find something to eat when they land after several hundred kilometres of flight. And those things depend on decisions taken nearby — about wastewater, about building along the shores, about what we do with the land upstream.
A wetland is also the cheapest protection a coastal city has against its own future: against torrential rain, against salinisation, against heat. Not because it is beautiful. Because it works.
In closing
Wetland restoration is not nostalgia for some earlier state of nature. It is an investment in infrastructure we once had and destroyed, without realising what it was worth.
The difference between protection and restoration is the difference between stopping the bleeding and healing the patient. Both are needed. But in a situation where four out of every five habitats are damaged, the first on its own leads nowhere.
Nature needs not only our protection but also our intervention — specific, timely and in the right place.
Sources for the figures: Global Wetland Outlook 2025, Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar) — loss of more than 400 million hectares since 1970 and close to a quarter of the remaining wetlands in a degraded state; European Environment Agency, “State of nature in the EU” (EEA Report No 10/2020) — 81 % of habitat assessments in unfavourable or bad condition; Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 on nature restoration — the 2030 and 2050 targets. The data on Lake Vaya are based on observations maintained by the Via Pontica Foundation.
