Nature as Persona or Infrastructure? Ecosystem Restoration, Services and Nature-Based Solutions for Resilient Communities

Abstract

The state of the global environment highlights the urgency of addressing climate change, yet the biodiversity crisis remains overlooked by decision-makers and much of the public. From this perspective ecosystem restoration and more broadly use of NBS can build a pathway towards more resilient future. To use those tools wisely, in particular under the Nature Restoration Regulation, it is critical to reflect on: what kind of relationship between humans and nature is implied when ecosystems are restored? This paper explores this question through the long-term research experience built in the Pilica and Łódź research platforms. It brings together perspectives developed through Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER), ecosystem-service research and ecohydrology, including the experience gained from the UNESCO-IHP Ecohydrology programme. The Pilica River Demonstration Project connected long-term observations of water quality and catchment processes with analysis of ecosystem functioning and desired (inclusively chosen) interventions designed to enhance ecosystem services along urban-rural gradient (Wagner et al. 2009). It served demonstration (Krauze and Wagner 2019) that NBS should be understood in relation to classical water-ecosystem theories and to the ecological context in which they are implemented. The concept of a continuum of ecosystem-service transfer highlights that NBS can maintain, restore or enable ecological functions across urban – rural - conservation zones rather than simply replace a particular item of grey infrastructure. The ecological context is therefore critical, because NBS are not universally transferable technical objects, and their capacity to remain effective under changing conditions and management regimes within which they operate. Then, ecosystem services have far too often been instrumental in demonstrating the importance of ecological functions for human well-being when bringing ecological considerations into decision-making. In consequence, their application unintentionally reinforces an anthropocentric perspective. An ecosystem optimised for a particular human service may not be the ecosystem that best maintains ecological integrity. Maximising recreational accessibility may conflict with habitat requirements; increasing water retention may alter seasonal hydrological dynamics important for particular species; and simplifying vegetation may improve perceptions of safety while reducing habitat diversity. A visually pleasing urban landscape may also conflict with the spatial and temporal requirements of non-human organisms. Research undertaken in Łódź illustrates both the importance and complexity of this social dimension. Włodarczyk-Marciniak and Krauze 2023 showed that perceptions of ecosystem-service provision by blue-green infrastructure differ between social groups. There are substantial differences in how residents value ecosystem services provided by modified and unmodified urban water bodies (Włodarczyk-Marciniak et al. 2025). Such findings demonstrate that ecosystem services are not only biophysical properties but also represent relationships between ecosystems and particular groups of people. Experience, knowledge and social context determine what is recognised as valuable, attractive or useful, therefore what can stay or must be removed from our surroundings. This raises a further question: what remains invisible when both ecological functions and their social value are assessed primarily from a human perspective? The distinction between nature as object, subject and persona offers one way of articulating this problem. Nature as object is treated as a resource or infrastructure that can be controlled and optimised. Nature as subject implies recognition of intrinsic ecological value and ecological integrity. Nature as persona goes further by asking whether ecosystems and other-than-human beings should have interests that are represented in decisions independently of their usefulness to humans. This could become a conceptual tool for examining the assumptions embedded in restoration and environmental governance. This conceptual distinction becomes particularly critical whenever political or particular interests navigate the interest of general publics and /or refer to the commons. This is not merely a philosophical distinction. It potentially changes the unit of analysis and the criteria of restoration. If nature is an object, restoration is primarily evaluated according to the services or functions it delivers to people. If nature is a subject, ecological integrity becomes anobjective in its own. If nature has status of a persona, governance must additionally consider whether non-human entities have interests that deserve representation independently of their usefulness to humans. The stake here is long-term sustainability raising from ability to live with uncertainty and give a real way to nature-based solutions: solutions build on fully operational ecosystems, not extracted blue or green ingredients. The long-term perspective of LTER/LTSER is particularly important here because ecological trajectories often extend beyond the temporal scale of individual projects. The Pilica experience demonstrates how decades of observation can progressively reveal relationships between water quality, catchment processes, land management and ecological functioning. How those could be re-interpreted by stakeholders and how very practical in fact approach can develop into at least consideration of nature as stakeholder in co-creating the local realms. In Łódź, long-term socio-ecological research has documented the transformation of thinking about urban water from a largely engineered and hidden component of the city towards a visible element of blue-green infrastructure. However the questions of : whose connectivity are we restoring, and how this approach differs from the one that led to current deterioration of living conditions remain unsolved. Saying this we must finally consider that restoration targets could be broadened beyond ecosystem-service delivery towards multispecies and process-based objectives. Long-term monitoring could consider not only whether an intervention reduces flooding, improves water quality or increases recreational value, but whether it provides conditions for other species and ecological processes to persist, move, reproduce and respond to disturbance. This brings a different interpretation of resilience - it should not be defined only by the continued capacity of ecosystems to support existing patterns of human consumption and development, but by whether restoration maintains the capacity of living systems themselves to persist and adapt under changing conditions. The central proposition is therefore not that ecosystem services should be abandoned, nor that NBS should be detached from human needs. Rather, ecosystem services can be understood as one dimension of a much larger set of relationships between humans and living systems. The title question is open. It asks whether the growing use of ecological processes in infrastructure, planning and adaptation represents a genuine transformation in the human–nature relationship, or whether nature is simply being assigned new functions within essentially anthropocentric systems.