ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1681757
River Restoration via CAP Eco-Schemes: Current Support and Future Opportunities for Blue Infrastructure
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
- 2Universidade de Lisboa Centro de Estudos Florestais, Lisbon, Portugal
- 3Universitat Duisburg-Essen Abteilung Aquatische Okologie, Essen, Germany
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Freshwater ecosystems across Europe face significant degradation, with agricultural practices playing a central role. The 2023–2027 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) introduces new eco-schemes that could support river restoration, a key goal of EU environmental legislation. This study presents a systematic analysis of eco-schemes in all 27 EU CAP Strategic Plans, assessing their alignment with river restoration goals. We reviewed over 130 approved eco-schemes, classifying them according to their potential to support eleven predefined restoration actions (e.g., floodplain reconnection, instream habitat improvement). Support was categorized as direct, indirect, potential, or not supported. The analysis combined AI-assisted text processing with manual validation. Results reveal considerable variation in how Member States use eco-schemes to support river restoration. While some countries offer multiple schemes with direct or indirect relevance, most focus on maintaining existing practices. Only a limited number explicitly support actions like riparian buffer restoration or wetland creation. Over 30% of all eco-schemes fall into the “potential” category, where design could be enhanced to support freshwater restoration more explicitly. Although river restoration is not a core target of CAP eco-schemes, this new instrument creates strategic opportunities to address freshwater degradation. The current implementation, however, reflects limited ambition and uneven alignment with EU water policy goals. The paper proposes adjustments to scheme design and classification methods to better embed blue infrastructure restoration within the CAP framework. This study offers the first EU-wide analysis of eco-schemes for river restoration, providing a critical baseline for future policy development and mid-term CAP revisions.
Keywords: Agricultural policy, Eco-schemes, environmental governance, Rural develoment, Water Management
Received: 07 Aug 2025; Accepted: 26 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pereira Dos Santos, Birk and Ferreira. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Leonor Pereira Dos Santos, leonorsantos@isa.ulisboa.pt
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