Mainstreaming Nature-Based Solutions for Water Resilience through System-Wide Landscape Planning

Climate change is exacerbating droughts, floods, and water quality degradation across Europe, with particularly strong impacts in Mediterranean regions. While Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) are central to the EU Water Resilience Strategy, their implementation is often constrained by mono-hazard approaches, sectoral thinking, and fragmented governance and funding structures. These same structural barriers extend beyond water management, affecting flood risk management, landscape-scale adaptation and broader resilience planning, where institutional fragmentation and limited policy acceptance continue to hinder the deployment of NbS as integrated, system-wide resilience measures.

This contribution proposes a system-wide landscape planning approach grounded in a Complex Adaptive System of Systems (CASoS) perspective, which conceptualises landscapes as interdependent biophysical, socio-economic and governance systems. Resilience to climate change and extreme events is understood as the capacity to maintain key system functions (e.g., water regulation and supply, energy provision, mobility and ecosystem regulation), safeguard populations and critical services (e.g., healthcare delivery, emergency response, education and social care), adapt to evolving drivers, and transform adaptation pathways beyond critical tipping points rather than returning to pre-event states.

The approach is demonstrated through a Mediterranean case study using landscape characterisation and cross-domain typologies to classify landscape archetypes by integrating biophysical, socio-economic and governance factors with spatial multi-hazard analysis. Potential impacts on Key Community Systems (KCS), including water, health, ecosystems, mobility, energy and economic activities, are assessed to identify NbS such as floodplain and wetland restoration, natural water retention measures and green–blue infrastructure as risk reduction and resilience-building opportunities. NbS contributions to adaptation are evaluated using the Landscape Resilience Curve, which supports the definition of adaptation pathways and the sequencing of NbS portfolios by analysing how interventions modify exposure, sensitivity and recovery capacity under increasing hazard intensity.

Key barriers to NbS mainstreaming, including institutional silos, limited data integration and weak cross-sector coordination, are analysed alongside the governance and investment co-benefits of NbS, highlighting pathways for their scalable and system-wide implementation in support of climate-resilient water management and landscape-scale adaptation.