Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified ecosystems, that address socio-economic and environmental challenges, while simultaneously providing human well-being, resilience and biodiversity benefits (UNEA, 2022). Within the framework of a global ecosystem approach, NbS must encompass ecological, societal, political, economic and cultural issues at all levels, from the individual to the collective, from local to national, from the public or private sphere.
As recently highlighted by IPCC and IPBES, climate change and biodiversity degradation cannot be separated, and must be considered together. For this reason, this session is especially focused on the way NbS can act as climate change adaptation solutions. Considering various ecosystems (marine and coastal, urban, cropland, mountainous, forest, rivers and lakes,.,), NbS as interventions for climate adaptation includes the adaptation to: sea level rise (flooding and erosion), changes of the water regime (floods, droughts, water quality and availability), rise in temperatures (heat waves, forest fires, drought, energy consumption), plant stress and increase of pests (variation of yields, forest dieback), to minimize their associated social and economic negative impacts.
Therefore, this session aims to promote interdisciplinary research related to ecosystem restoration, preservation and management, to put forward the complexity that is often hidden by simplifying hypotheses and approaches (sector-based silo approach, homogeneity of environments, ...).
Specific topics of interest are the followings:
- Complexity: nature of ecosystems and the risk of oversimplification, interconnection between NbS and complementary areas, consideration of uncertainties (future climate and associated impacts...)
- Scales: spatial scales with the integration of NbS in their environment, and temporal scales considering sustainability over time, variability of bio-physical processes and climate change effects
- Ecosystem services: understanding the bio-geophysical processes, spatial shift between the location of NbS and the location of beneficiaries, modification under climate change (threshold, inflection point), co-benefits or on the contrary degradation and negative effects
- Assessment and indicators: measurement and modelling protocols to evaluate NbS performances, capacity to measure the complexity, resilience and stability of the solutions.