A few years ago I sat in a meeting about saving one of the biggest bodies of water in the region. National programme, the right intentions, a full room. Tourism pulling one way, industry another, fishing somewhere in the middle, and a line of people making the case that we had to protect the local fish before they vanished. Everyone in that room wanted to hold the water still, the way they remembered it.

I kept thinking we were fighting the last war.

Outside that room, the water was already leaving. Over the past ten years I have watched species arrive in my part of the country that had no business being here. Plants and insects belonging in France, moving north into our fields and ditches, while older residents got quietly pushed out as the temperature shifted. Nobody sent an invitation. The climate did.

So I keep returning to one uncomfortable question: if the ground is moving, what exactly are we protecting, and for whom.

The baseline that keeps sliding

Malin Pinsky's data says it plainly: as water warms, marine life is moving toward the poles, sometimes hundreds of kilometres within a single working life. Whole fisheries are relocating out from under the management plans built around them.

Daniel Pauly named the deeper trap thirty years ago: shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation takes the ocean of their youth as the natural state, measures decline from there, and forgets how full the sea used to be. The baseline slides down, and we keep calling the depleted version normal.

When the baseline is sliding and the species are on the move, spending enormous sums to pin biodiversity to one region is not protection. It is grief with a budget.

The word we keep using wrong

We reach for three words: restoration, protection, regeneration. We use them as though they meant the same thing, and we rarely say what any of them is meant to do.

Protection still matters. Keeping a functioning ecosystem intact, holding back the bulldozer and the trawler, that work is real and urgent. A living system we still have is worth more than one we promise to rebuild.

Restoration is where the confusion sets in. It looks backward by design, asking what was here and trying to put it back. That instinct made sense when the climate sat still. It makes far less sense when the trees, the butterflies and the fish that defined the old reference point are leaving on their own. You restore a thing to its former state. What do you do when the former state no longer fits the weather it has to live in.

So let me own the provocation. Restoration, as nostalgia, is a past narrative.

Adding function, not holding the line

Brett KenCairn offered the reframe I had been missing: the planet is running at roughly half of its former biological capacity. Half the living tissue, half the soil life, half the water-holding. The story stops being about freezing a snapshot. It becomes about rebuilding living capacity, wherever we are, with whatever will function in the climate that is coming.

JD White and the Climate Water Project talk about rehydrating the land: soil that works like a sponge rather than a roof, water slowed and sunk into the ground rather than rushed to the sea. Living forests move moisture across continents like a pump made of leaves. Lose the living tissue and you lose the pump. The rain stops arriving.

Andrew Millison's films from India show farmers turning cracked, written-off ground back into working water systems, earthworks that refill wells dry for a generation. The Great Green Wall across the Sahel is the same move at continental scale. None of it is a tidy community garden. It is deliberate, often engineered, and it builds more water-holding and more shade than the original ground ever had.

The stakes are people, not postcards

This is where I lose patience with small gestures. A protected hectare with a few trees and a ribbon-cutting is not adaptation. It is a photo.

The Lancet Countdown reported that almost every monitored region in Europe saw more heat deaths across 2015 to 2024 than in the decade around 2000. These are not nature stories. They are health stories, and they land hardest in the densest, hottest, poorest parts of our towns.

If we want cities to stop turning into heat traps, we have to treat living systems as infrastructure. Shade, soil and water engineered into the street, the roof and the schoolyard. Interventions chosen for what they do, not for how they photograph.

I have changed my own answer to that meeting. I would still fight to protect the water we have. I would stop pretending we get to hold it exactly as it was. And I would put the real money into adding function: more water held in the ground, more shade over the street, more living tissue doing work, measured by what it does for the people who live there.

Restoration looks back. The communities that come through the next decades will be the ones that learned to build forward.

At FutureFit Collab this is the conversation we keep having with leaders and their teams: how to see the whole system, how to let go of the baseline without losing your nerve, and how to turn that into choices made in the room on Monday morning. If that is the file on your desk this year, I would welcome the exchange.

Berend Aanraad