Water underpins every aspect of life, from healthy ecosystems to economic prosperity and human well-being. Climate change intensifies risks such as droughts, floods, and water quality degradation; a reality starkly evident across Europe in recent years. In this context, ensuring water resilience becomes an urgent priority. One year after the adoption of the EU Water Resilience Strategy (2025), significant efforts are needed across European regions to align governance, financing, and systemic innovation for protecting water resources and fostering a water-smart economy. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are central to achieving these ambitions. By restoring ecosystems and their biodiversity, enhancing natural water retention, and reinforcing connectivity between terrestrial and aquatic systems, NbS offer transformative pathways to strengthen socio-economic-ecological resilience. However, moving from strategic ambition to practical and large-scale deployment has revealed complex real-world challenges. From regulatory and institutional bottlenecks to financial hurdles, social resistance, technical performance gaps, and a widespread lack of specialised technical expertise, empirical know-how, and operational capacity among solution providers, the path to mainstreaming NbS is rarely linear.
This session aims to critically examine the reality of NbS projects one year into the EU Water Resilience Strategy framework. We invite contributions from both recently initiated projects and longer-standing NbS experiences that offer valuable evidence and lessons for the Strategy. Submissions should showcase both aspects of NbS implementation: success stories on one hand, but also the concrete barriers, unexpected outcomes, failures, and trade-offs encountered along the implementation process and the strategies used to overcome them. Submissions may present real-world case studies demonstrating how institutional, social, or technical hurdles were successfully navigated through adaptive management and problem-solving. Finally, submissions showcasing long-term monitoring, measurable impacts, potential for scalability, and NbS co-benefits for water availability, disaster risk reduction, and ecosystem management are highly encouraged, ensuring that the discussion bridges scientific evidence with real-world impact to enhance water resilience.