Wetlands are often hailed as nature's superheroes, offering a multitude of benefits like water storage, biodiversity support, and carbon sequestration. But here's the catch: while they're crucial for drought resilience, they can also inadvertently become breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes. This paradox lies at the heart of a critical challenge in Southern Europe, where the integration of public health into wetland nature-based solutions (NBS) is gaining traction.
Nature-based solutions have evolved from niche conservation strategies to cornerstone policies for climate adaptation across Europe. Wetlands, in particular, are now recognized as multifunctional powerhouses, mitigating the impacts of droughts and floods while providing essential ecosystem services. However, their very characteristics—standing water, dense vegetation, and diverse microhabitats—can also create ideal conditions for disease vectors like mosquitoes.
Two EU-funded initiatives, NBS4Drought and IDAlert, are tackling this complex issue head-on. NBS4Drought focuses on expanding the use of wetland-based NBS to enhance drought resilience, while IDAlert develops climate-sensitive infectious disease indicators and early-warning tools within a One Health framework. These projects highlight both the promise and the practical challenges of large-scale wetland implementation.
NBS4Drought aims to bridge the gap in evidence regarding the cost-effectiveness and hydrological performance of wetland NBS, empowering practitioners and policymakers to make informed investments. By piloting and evaluating interventions across diverse European contexts, the initiative seeks to facilitate wider adoption. In contrast, IDAlert prioritizes human and animal health by integrating climatic, ecological, and epidemiological data into decision-support tools. This approach enables local governments and public health authorities to anticipate and respond to health risks associated with NBS deployment, emphasizing co-creation with stakeholders like practitioners, community representatives, health agencies, and environmental managers.
But here's where it gets controversial: can we truly balance the ecological benefits of wetlands with the potential risks they pose to public health? The answer lies in understanding the intricate interplay between wetland ecology and disease vector dynamics. Wetlands naturally host conditions that support mosquito breeding, such as standing water and dense vegetation. Recent studies have shown that species like Culex pipiens and Aedes albopictus thrive in wetland-edge habitats, sewage-fed ditches, and peri-urban marshes, particularly under climate change conditions of rising temperatures and erratic rainfall.
And this is the part most people miss: the net benefit of wetland NBS is not automatic. Whether an intervention reduces, maintains, or increases disease risk depends on local factors like hydrology, species composition, management practices, and climate trends. This complexity underscores the need for integrated strategies that harmonize conservation goals with public health priorities.
Take the Natural Park of Aiguamolls de l’Empordà in Spain, for example. This wetland area, valued for its biodiversity and tourism, has become an “open-air laboratory” for studying the transmission dynamics of diseases like West Nile virus. Researchers and citizen scientists have monitored mosquito populations, revealing how habitat structure and water management influence vector populations. Shallow pools, irrigation canals, and man-made lagoons can all support mosquito larval development under the right conditions, particularly during hot summers with erratic rainfall.
The Empordà initiative stands out for its collaborative approach, bringing together wetland managers, epidemiologists, and community groups to co-design monitoring strategies and refine management actions. The goal? Preserve biodiversity while reducing human exposure to infected mosquitoes. This integrated practice, combining ecological restoration, targeted surveillance, and public communication, serves as a model for projects like IDAlert.
In Attica, Greece, the interaction between wetlands, urbanization, and mosquito-borne diseases has yielded valuable lessons. Peri-urban wetlands and coastal lagoons provide significant biodiversity and ecosystem services but also face challenges like the proliferation of Culex pipiens and Aedes albopictus. Entomological surveys have informed integrated mosquito control strategies, including larval source management and enhanced coordination between public health agencies and local municipalities. IDAlert’s engagement with regional authorities through workshops and knowledge-exchange events has supported capacity building for surveillance and vector management.
So, what are the key takeaways for adaptive management? First, the ecological heterogeneity of wetlands leads to spatial and temporal variability in disease risk. Morphological and hydrological features like slope, depth, and vegetation composition can be managed to minimize standing water pockets that favor mosquito reproduction. Second, active, science-based monitoring—using entomological traps, larval sampling, and pathogen screening—is essential for adaptive management and public health protection. Third, cross-sector governance must be institutionalized to ensure information sharing and shared responsibilities among environmental managers, public health practitioners, and local communities.
Workshops and co-creation processes, as promoted by IDAlert, are effective for developing shared indicators and response protocols. These lessons are not theoretical but are grounded in empirical work in Girona and Attica, as well as broader European guidance on wetlands monitoring and NBS implementation.
In practice, managing vector risk in wetland NBS requires an integrated toolkit encompassing design, management, surveillance, and communication. Design strategies like incorporating hydrological variability and maintaining open water patches can discourage mosquito breeding without compromising biodiversity. Routine inspections of peripheral infrastructure and targeted biological larviciding are crucial for management. Surveillance, particularly adult and larval monitoring, enables early detection of vector populations and informed public health advisories. Finally, public communication plays a vital role in informing residents, encouraging protective behaviors, and fostering community stewardship.
But let’s not sugarcoat it: trade-offs are inevitable. Wetlands deliver measurable benefits in water regulation, biodiversity, and cultural value, but they exist within social-ecological systems with competing demands from land use, agriculture, tourism, and urban pressure. In Aiguamolls, for instance, tourism pressures, shifting agricultural practices, and sea-level rise complicate management choices. Similarly, in Attica, peri-urban development and limited maintenance capacity challenge the adoption of complex designs without additional funding and support.
These trade-offs highlight the need for rigorous economic analysis to quantify the benefits and costs of different wetland NBS designs. Policymakers require this evidence to prioritize investments and account for the hidden costs of ongoing management.
For practitioners, municipalities, and funders, several practical steps emerge. Vector-risk appraisal should be integrated into the earliest stages of NBS planning, with entomological expertise playing a key role. Designs should prioritize hydrological dynamism over static pools, and active management and monitoring must be planned for static features. Institutionalizing surveillance through funding for entomological capacity or partnerships with research institutes and citizen science networks is essential. Finally, integrating ecological and social objectives through collaborative approaches is imperative, as local communities often serve as primary observers of mosquito nuisances and effective collaborators in maintenance, reporting, and outreach.
From a policy perspective, Europe’s growing portfolio of wetland restoration and NBS projects calls for harmonized guidance that integrates climate resilience, biodiversity conservation, and public health. This guidance must be grounded in empirical evidence, with a focus on pilot demonstrations and surveillance activities. Financing models should encompass not only initial capital costs but also recurrent expenses for monitoring and maintenance.
Funding instruments that link restoration enhancement with disease surveillance capacity will be particularly valuable, ensuring that well-intentioned interventions do not become neglected liabilities. Projects like IDAlert are already moving in this direction by producing transferable evidence, facilitating stakeholder engagement, and developing indicator systems for decision-makers.
The bottom line? In a changing climate with hotter, drier summers and shifting rainfall patterns, wetlands are indispensable for resilient water management. The challenge is not to choose between ecosystems and health but to design, monitor, and govern NBS in a way that accounts for the full spectrum of ecosystem services and disservices. This requires sustained investment in multidisciplinary science, practical design standards with public health safeguards, and social processes that enable cross-sector collaboration.
The Aiguamolls and Attica case studies demonstrate the feasibility of these integrated strategies, showing that wetlands can serve as both biodiversity hotspots and climate-resilient infrastructure when managed effectively. By adopting these approaches, policymakers and practitioners can deliver resilient, equitable, and health-conscious outcomes for communities across Europe.
But the question remains: are we ready to embrace the complexity and trade-offs inherent in these solutions? The answer will determine the future of wetlands—and our health—in a rapidly changing world.
