Powering Nature: Creating the Conditions to Enable Nature-Based Solutions
This systemic enabling framework is informed by key evidence and ideas to unleash the power of nature to help solve key societal challenges.
The world needs a new, smarter way of thinking and acting. For a sustainable future, we need to address three intertwined global crises: biodiversity loss, climate change and equitable development. We need solutions that are smart and effective at simultaneously tackling these and their associated societal challenges. We need a fundamental societal reset and nature-based solutions are an important part of it.
This systemic enabling framework is informed by key evidence and ideas to unleash the power of nature to help solve key societal challenges at local to global scales, while maximizing its positive nature-people-climate contribution. By identifying structural barriers, policy levers and systemic enablers, this report provides governments, decision-makers, civil society and the private sector with a practical basis for integrating nature-based solutions into planning decisions at different scales and in multiple sectors.
Enhancing Nature to Provide Sustained Human Wellbeing
Nature-based solutions comprise a broad set of responses that protect, restore or proactively manage landscapes, seascapes, watersheds and city corridors in a way that the societal services they provide can be maximized. From protecting salt marshes to restoring forest habitats to sustainable watershed management, nature-based solutions are already in operation in different parts of the world, at different scales and in different sectors.
Five of the world’s most pressing societal challenges are:
- Mitigating and adapting to climate change
- Disaster risk reduction
- Enhancing human health
- Ensuring food security
- Safeguarding access to clean water
The first thing to recognize is that nature-based solutions are context-specific. They tackle one or more societal challenges and need to be tailored to the local environment. But they are also scalable to the landscape or regional level, thus amplifying their effectiveness. Importantly, nature-based solutions must be designed with Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) and carry benefits that are distributed equitably.
In addition to tackling societal challenges, the result of any nature-based solution must deliver both a net socioeconomic benefit at the local level (where the intervention takes place) and a net biodiversity gain. These co-benefits, the societal challenge outcomes and the enhanced ecosystems will result in sustained human well-being.
Investing in Nature's Support Systems
If effectively embedded within progress towards sustainable development, nature-based solutions can be a durable and scalable way to address societal challenges, reverse the downward trend in biodiversity and enhance equitable human well-being.
Taking a nature-positive approach to transforming food systems catalyses the shift to more sustainable, productive lands. Rehabilitating degraded agricultural land and sustainably managing existing productive lands generates societal benefits in terms of higher crop yields, better nutritional quality and greater food security at local and global levels. There are also long-term benefits for the climate since healthy ecosystems sequester more carbon.
Maintaining ‘ecological corridors’, when roads and other infrastructure is built or when agricultural land is expanded, can reduce resource competition between animals and humans and allows processes upon which we depend to continue undisturbed, such as pollination. At a local level, community- managed connectivity projects could even bring in revenue through ecotourism. A well-planned scaling up of connected landscapes preserves migratory routes that cross countries and continents and allows vulnerable species to find refuge in a warming climate.
In river systems worldwide – including the Mississippi, Rhine, Yangtze and Sacramento rivers – floodplains are being reconnected and allowed to flood, rather than relying solely on engineered structures such as dams, dikes and flood walls. The societal benefits of a ‘diversified portfolio’ approach to managing flood risk come in the form of avoided damages and associated costs as our changing climate leads to more extreme weather. Biodiversity is enhanced through the restoration of floodplain ecosystems, which are among the most productive in the world.
Around the world, low-lying small islands and coastal areas are demonstrating the value of protecting ‘green infrastructure’ for increasing resilience to flooding and coastal erosion. Maintaining and restoring coastal forests, wetlands and mangroves complements engineered ‘grey infrastructure’ and can provide protection at lower cost, while delivering additional long-term societal and environmental benefits. These include sequestering carbon and preserving important spawning grounds and nurseries for fish and shellfish upon which local livelihoods depend.
A smart approach to nature-based solutions builds in resilience to different possible futures in a changing climate. Assessing the risk to specific activities posed by climate change (e.g. investment decisions based on how the protection of restored mangroves may diminish with rising seas) and working with local communities to ensure activities do not inadvertently exacerbate vulnerability to climate change ensure the benefits are sustained for decades to come.
Engaging IPLCs in the design, implementation and scale up of nature-based solutions is another critical element to ensure their long-term viability. Respecting local communities’ cultural and ecological rights to the land and co-designing projects such that they are suited to the specific environment and rooted in the values and norms of the people who live and work there will help to ensure permanent, positive outcomes.
Unleashing the full potential of nature-based solutions will require a significant shift in the mindset of public and private investors. Alongside new financial mechanisms and incentives, this will involve: redirection of financial flows away from activities that undermine ecosystems; better understanding of the value and benefit structure of nature-based solutions (including avoided costs); and new ways to mobilize private capital towards nature-positive practices.
A key tool for decision-makers at any level is the ability to monitor the performance of a policy intervention to ensure it is creating the expected benefits, to fully understand any trade- offs and to avoid unintended (collateral) effects. This report proposes a set of field-based indicators to generate quantifiable data about the social and environmental impact of nature- based solutions, to support policymakers in selecting the most effective solution to a societal challenge.
A number of countries around the world offer tangible case studies for how to effectively implement and scale up nature- based solutions. The Colombian government has drawn up a comprehensive national policy framework that recognizes the potential of nature-based solutions to accelerate the country’s green development path as well as achieving efficiency in public spending. Malaysia has established several policies and enacted legislation to maintain at least 50 per cent of the country’s land mass under forest and tree cover, enabling the private sector and civil society to advance the implementation of nature-based solutions across Malaysia at a landscape level.
International Environmental Conventions and their Agreements over the past few decades have addressed specific issues, but remain too fragmented to reflect the intertwined and connected societal challenges that the world faces today or the potential that nature-based solutions have to offer. A coordinated policy approach under a set of principles is needed that integrates and aligns nature-based solutions across UN Conventions and within governments.
Despite a clear understanding of the power of nature-based solutions, there has been insufficient action by policymakers, corporate institutions and financial bodies to maximize its potential. Factors that led to the destruction of nature in the past are still obstacles to nature being part of the solution to today’s challenges. What worked in the past will no longer suffice – an urgent policy reset is needed.
A Systemic Enabling Framework
This report proposes a systemic enabling framework to effectively implement, scale up and mainstream nature-based solutions. Given their importance and viability for change, it focuses on three categories of structural barriers — sociocultural, institutional and economic — and then presents a set of policy levers that are available to decision-makers to overcome these barriers, organized around three overarching categories of systemic enablers: inclusive governance, smart planning and progressive economic and financial regulation. Together, action in these three areas represents an important step towards an integrated whole-of-government approach to social and economic policy, which is the most effective way to power nature-based solutions.