The Mining and Quarry Restoration Network (MQRN), a new and necessary platform working for the improvement of mine closures

While mining remains a strategic sector for energy transition and technology development, its legacy includes extensive areas of degraded land that, under national and European legislation, must be restored. Increasingly, mine restoration is being reframed beyond regulatory compliance as an opportunity to recover biodiversity, restore ecological functions, and enhance ecological connectivity. In Europe, policy frameworks such as the European Nature Restoration Regulation place ecological restoration at the core of sustainability agendas, explicitly targeting degraded habitats, including active and abandoned mining sites. However, translating these ambitions into effective, science-based restoration outcomes remains a major challenge. Restoration success is often constrained by limited integration of ecological knowledge, inconsistent technical standards, and fragmented governance throughout the mining lifecycle. This talk presents the Mining and Quarry Restoration Network (MQRN; Red de Restauración de Minas y Canteras in Spanish), established in Spain in 2024 as a national, non-profit, multi-stakeholder platform aimed at fostering high-quality mine restoration practices. The Network brings together mining operators, consultancies, academic institutions, and public administrations to co-produce restoration approaches grounded in a multidisciplinary science while ensuring operational feasibility and regulatory alignment. Importantly, MQRN promotes a paradigm shift in mine restoration: from site-level reclamation focused on stabilization and compliance, towards landscape-scale ecological restoration that supports biodiversity recovery, ecosystem functioning, and ecological connectivity. By integrating soil functionality, native species dynamics, geochemical constraints, and long-term ecosystem trajectories, a central contribution of the Network is the development of standardized, evidence-based restoration protocols that reduce uncertainty for operators and regulators while improving ecological outcomes. These efforts are reinforced through technical working groups, training programs, and collaborative research–practice exchanges. By fostering collaboration between administrations, industry, and universities, MQRN demonstrates how coordinated, science-driven networks can transform mandatory mine restoration into a strategic lever for biodiversity recovery and climate–nature alignment. Beyond the Spanish context, MQRN provides a transferable model that may inspire the development of similar national or international networks addressing the mining–biodiversity nexus.