Continued research momentum, International Collaboration, and Strategic Milestones

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Europe’s Historic Pond Loss

For centuries, ponds were a major part of Europe’s managed landscape. They were not simply natural features. Many were deliberately built and maintained to support food production, agriculture and water management.

The scale was remarkable. In England and Wales alone, an estimated 800,000 ponds existed by 1880. Across continental Europe, extensive pond systems had been developed centuries earlier. In South Bohemia, around 20,000 fishponds covering approximately 180,000 hectares existed by the sixteenth century, while France’s Dombes region developed a network of shallow ponds that remains part of the landscape today.

These were not isolated pools of water. Some operated as connected systems, with ponds, canals and channels working together across entire landscapes.

What Caused This Historic Pond Loss?

The answer is surprisingly practical: many ponds stopped being valuable enough to maintain.

Ponds require ongoing work. Sediment accumulates, vegetation grows, banks need maintenance and water systems need to be managed. For centuries, communities had economic reasons to do that work.

But those incentives gradually changed.

Piped water reduced the need for livestock ponds. Industrial fertilisers reduced the value of nutrient-rich pond sediment and marl. Cheap sea fish competed with freshwater pond aquaculture.

The ponds did not suddenly stop working. In many cases, the reason for maintaining them simply disappeared.

The historic pond loss seen during the twentieth century therefore offers more than an environmental story. Some historic European pond landscapes survived for centuries where their productive value remained.

The Bigger Lesson: Nature-Based Solutions Need a Reason to Survive

This history raises an important question for modern nature-based solutions.

It is not enough for an intervention to work when it is first constructed. What happens five, ten or fifty years later?

Wetlands, ponds and other nature-based infrastructure still require management. If maintaining them continuously depends on external funding, their long-term future can become uncertain once that funding ends.

Historical pond systems suggest another approach: design environmental infrastructure so that maintaining it also creates value.

That value might come from useful biomass, agricultural inputs, water treatment benefits or other locally valuable outputs. Ideally, these benefits help cover maintenance costs and create an incentive for communities or organisations to keep the system functioning.

What Old Pond Systems Can Teach Modern Design

Historic European pond systems also contain several design ideas worth investigating rather than simply copying.

Many ponds were built in chains or cascades. Water moved from one basin to another, allowing different parts of the system to perform different functions.

Some systems were periodically drained rather than permanently flooded. Sediment could be removed and returned to surrounding agricultural land, turning accumulated material into a useful resource.

These ideas have interesting parallels with modern constructed wetlands, nutrient recovery and biomass valorisation.

But historical practices cannot simply be transferred to modern projects or different climates. Water availability, ecology, land governance and public-health risks vary enormously between regions.

Europe Is Only Part of the Story

Perhaps the most important comparison is not with Europe at all.

Across parts of Africa, communities have managed seasonal wetlands for generations. Dambos in countries including Malawi and Zambia are seasonally waterlogged landscapes that have long supported agriculture and local livelihoods.

Unlike many of Europe’s historic ponds, these systems were never simply abandoned as relics of an earlier landscape.

For organisations working on nature-based solutions in Africa, living local knowledge may therefore offer lessons that are even more relevant than Europe’s historical record.

The value of looking backwards is not to recreate medieval European ponds. It is to understand why some managed water systems survived for centuries while others disappeared — and then ask which of those lessons are worth testing in today’s environmental projects.

Building Nature-Based Solutions That Last

The disappearance of historic ponds offers a simple but important lesson.

Technical performance alone does not guarantee longevity.

Nature-based solutions need ecological benefits, but they also need realistic maintenance systems, local ownership and incentives that remain after the initial project or funding cycle ends.

The challenge is therefore not only to design systems that work.

It is to design systems that people still have a reason to maintain decades later.

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But some of the tools for addressing this challenge may already exist in nature.

Wetland plants, together with the microorganisms and soils around their root systems, can contribute to natural water-cleaning processes. This nature-based approach is often associated with phytoremediation — the use of plants to remove, capture, stabilise or transform contaminants in the environment.

Wetland Plants for Water Remediation: How They Help Clean Water

Wetlands function as complex natural filtration systems.

As water moves through wetland environments, vegetation can slow its movement and help suspended particles settle. At the same time, plant roots create an important interface between the water, sediments and microorganisms.

Plants can take up certain nutrients and contaminants through their roots, while microorganisms living around the root zone can transform other pollutants through biological processes.

This means that water remediation in wetlands is not performed by plants alone. It is the result of interactions between plants, microorganisms, water and sediments.

What Pollutants Can Wetland Plants Help Address?

One important area of research is the removal of excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.

These nutrients occur naturally and are essential for plant growth. However, when excessive amounts enter water bodies — for example through wastewater or agricultural runoff — they can contribute to eutrophication, algal blooms and declining oxygen levels.

Wetland systems can help retain, transform and remove some of these nutrients through plant uptake, microbial activity and interactions with soils and sediments.

Aquatic plants have also been studied for their ability to accumulate certain heavy metals from contaminated water. Depending on the plant species and environmental conditions, metals may be adsorbed onto root surfaces or taken up and accumulated within plant tissues.

However, phytoremediation performance is not universal. Different plant species respond differently to particular pollutants, and factors such as water chemistry, pollutant concentration, temperature and exposure time can influence the results.

Why Nature-Based Water Remediation Matters

Conventional water-treatment technologies remain essential, particularly where high treatment performance or strict water-quality standards are required.

Nature-based approaches can offer a complementary option.

Wetland-based systems can potentially combine water-quality improvement with other environmental benefits, including habitat creation, ecosystem restoration and improved ecological resilience.

They can also provide opportunities to develop treatment approaches adapted to local environmental conditions rather than relying exclusively on energy- and infrastructure-intensive systems.

Understanding where these approaches work — and where they do not — requires field testing and scientific evidence.

What Pass NetZero Is Studying

Pass NetZero is exploring the potential of wetland plants for water remediation and how nature-based solutions can contribute to environmental resilience in Southern Africa.

As part of this work, experimental research in Namibia is examining how selected wetland plants interact with polluted water under controlled conditions. The research focuses on their potential role in reducing excess nutrients and selected contaminants, including heavy metals.

By monitoring changes in water quality over time, the project aims to build evidence about which plant-based approaches may be effective under local conditions.

The goal is not simply to demonstrate that plants can interact with pollutants. It is to understand which plants work, under what conditions, and how these processes could contribute to practical nature-based water remediation strategies.

Wetland Plants for Water Remediation: Looking to Nature for Solutions

Wetlands demonstrate that water treatment does not always have to begin with complex machinery.

Plants, microorganisms and natural ecological processes already interact with nutrients and contaminants in water. Scientific research can help us understand these processes more precisely and determine how they can be applied responsibly.

For regions facing growing pressures on water security, these nature-based approaches could become an important part of a broader toolkit for cleaner water and more resilient ecosystems.

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