Combining water engineering and landscape architecture practices for multifunctional and robust design of Nature-Based Solutions

Hydro-meteorological disasters have shown the fastest rate among all natural disasters. This is due to several factors: i) climate change, ii) population growth and land use change, and iii) poor water management practices. Traditional engineering solutions have shown to be ineffective in responding to such challenges and hydro-meteorological risks in general. In this respect, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) offer the means to respond to such increasing challenges by providing a range of benefits (i.e., hydro-meteorological risk reduction) and co-benefits (i.e., ecosystems restoration and increase socio-economic values). The need to incorporate numerous benefits and co-benefits into the design of NBS calls for a combination of knowledges and practices from water engineering and landscape architecture. These would be necessary to design an NBS site that have multiple functions that can incorporate multiple benefits and co-benefits. At the same time, NBS should be designed in such way to withstand possible changes and pressures. This in turn calls for novel design practices of NBS to support planning and implementation that can achieve multifunctional and robust results. In this work, a framework for multifunctional and robust design of NBS is addressed. This framework will combine the use of hydrodynamic models, GIS tools, topology analysis, adaptive options analysis, adaptive pathway design, multi-criteria analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and robustness evaluation. The framework will be applied to one of the RECONECT cases and the first results will be presented.