Enhancing Climate Change Adaptation in Coastal Areas through Nature-Based Solutions and Risk Assessment

Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) are increasingly embedded in policies for climate change adaptation, highlighting NBS’s capacity to mitigate the risks of negative external impacts or provide buffers against shocks. For instance, the European Green deal promotes the integration of NBS by providing a new narrative involving biodiversity, Ecosystem Services (ES) and, indirectly, all four priorities of Sendai Framework. The selection of suitable NBSs should be based on their ability to reduce the magnitude, duration, or frequency of climate hazards considering their effectiveness under present and future conditions, while simultaneously delivering valuable co-benefits. However, empirical evidence on NBS performance is lacking – especially for coastal and transitional environments where there is limited site-specific evidence - and although harmonization efforts are being developed, e.g. the IUCN global standards, internationally recognized NBS standards have not yet been adopted into policies. The REST-COAST (rest-coast.eu) project aims to address these issues by demonstrating that upscaled coastal restoration can provide a solution to climate change adaptation through the provisioning of regulating ES such as reduction of erosion risk, reduction of flood risk, climate change mitigation and water quality purification. This is being elaborated by developing a risk analysis, initiated by a systematic review to expand the evidence-base for NBS implementation through identifying coastal NBS performance indicators. This review indicated that performance is most frequently evaluated based on environmental and physical indicators, e.g., vegetation cover, carbon sequestration, morphological changes, sediment, and nutrient dynamics, measured in-situ at the habitat scale. Nevertheless, to assure their long-term effectiveness of NBSs it is crucial to consider their suitability and scalability in relation to multi-hazard scenarios. Therefore, highlighting the importance of modelling and new data technologies, which allow the exploration NBS’s effectiveness for climate change adaptation and risk reduction through the evaluation of transformative pathways – a complete set of interventions, including NBSs and grey infrastructure, at the macro scale. To do so, a conceptual risk framework for the Venice lagoon (Veneto region, Italy) is being developed that will integrate the NBS performance indicators with climate scenarios and NBS intervention strategies to evaluate risk reduction through ES provisioning. This framework will provide the basis for the development and implementation of a Bayesian Network for risk modelling, integrating data regarding historical observations, past numerical modelling, and climate change projections, as well as co-created adaptation pathways for the Venice Lagoon. Co-creating these what-if adaptation strategies, based on a shared desired future and climate change projections, has the potential to bring together stakeholders and decision-makers to better understand, estimate and evaluate the effect of NBS interventions. Through exploring these research inquiries, this work aims to support the establishment of better guidelines for coastal and transitional adaptation management and development.

 

The REST-COAST project is funded under the Horizon2020 grant agreement No. 101037097.