The journal Science published a study by researchers from United Kingdom and Spain and financed from EU funds concludes that ecological restoration in areas of high environmental degradation can help stop the loss of global biodiversity. Also showed that the conservation work that are most effective when the restoration is intended to ensure the quality of "ecosystem services" such as drinking water, food production and carbon storage.

This study is funded by REFORLAN project (Restoration of forest landscapes for biodiversity conservation and rural development in dry lands in Latin America). The project has a budget of 1.72 million euros through the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) in the area that develops the theme "Specific measures in support of international cooperation."

The director of the project, José M. Rey Benaya of the University of Alcalá in Spain, and his team analyzed the results of 89 evaluations of ecological restoration in different ecosystems on the basis of three criteria: differentiating the restored sites, degraded and reference (pristine). In addition, they have provided accurate measures of biodiversity and ecosystem processes of the systems analyzed.

James Bullock, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK, explained that although the ecological restoration increases biodiversity by 44% and improves ecosystem services by 25%, "it will never quite get as good an outcome as conserving or maintaining a pristine system".

The researchers found that intact places of reference were better than the damaged areas in terms of services and biodiversity.They concluded that "the ecological restoration work involves the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed, usually due to human activities. " However, it has not yet been sistematically studied if, in fact, these measures contribute to increase biodiversity, water quality and storage capacity of carbon.

The analysis enphasized that restoration activities led to an increase of biodiversity should also encourage ecosystem services, especially in tropical land areas, which contain large amounts of biodiversity and are subject to human pressures. It was found that the effects of restoration on aquatic systems were the weakest.

Professor Bullock cautioned that while restoration can help reverse losses, the new research shows that 'it is critical for human well-being that we conserve pristine habitats and the biodiversity and ecosystem services they provide'.

The European Union is making an effort to meet the targets it had set for 2010 to halt biodiversity loss. The first evaluation of the overall results of the Action Plan for Biodiversity showed that they were not reaching the targets set in the time envisaged, but the EU is anyway working to boost environmental protection in order to keep biodiversity safe in all the European countries with different activities.