The restoration activities should take place in areas with degraded habitats, and where protection measures against the causes of their degradation are already in place.

Proposals should develop and test innovative and technically challenging active restoration of deep-sea habitats. For this reason, and the cost of accessing the deep-sea, only one project may be funded with the budget available. Proposals should integrate different disciplines and novel approaches for the restoration that consider connectivity (including migratory species & vertical connections) in space and time, ecosystem modelling, as well as on site access, observation, and monitoring. Proposals should set up governance frameworks for the restoration by involving local and national relevant actors (those having an impact on the achievement of the restoration goals, those having an interest and those who are impacted by related actions) to enable acceptability, ownership and a mechanism for long-term commitment to the restoration that exceed typical business and political cycles on financing, managing, regulating, monitoring and enforcement. Some short-term objectives are required to allow for measurements of restoration impacts in a reasonably shorter time frame to get on the right trajectory, but then check on mid- to long- term (5-20 years) should be planned.

Proposals should advance the knowledge base on the socio-economic costs and benefits of deep-sea restoration: including addressing the socio-economic importance of deep-sea ecosystems; considering upscaling issues and costs with restoration of deep-sea habitats, and timescales considerations.
Proposals should identify and test additional protection and management measures of the areas, to support the active restoration interventions over the long time, and provide recommendations for their application for new protected areas. The proposals should contribute to filling the gaps in assessing deep-sea biodiversity recovery valuing changes in ecosystem goods and services; and contribute to define a natural capital accounting for deep-sea habitats.