Topics

Building with Nature for water security and climate adaptation requires a transdisciplinary collaboration between scientists, practitioners, engineers, builders, society, NGOs, and governments. It also requires innovative holistic approaches, design concepts, new building practices, adaptive technologies, hybrid combinations between blue-green-grey infrastructure, understanding of barriers and enablers as well as more efficient asset management and inspection techniques to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services and to achieve other benefits and co-benefits.

Monitoring and evaluation of Nature-Based Solutions requires collection and storage of various kinds of data and information, digital transformation, processing within GIS and dealings with uncertainties due to climate change and land development. It also requires a new generation of instrumentation, SCADA, Telemetry and IT platforms. Modelling for planning and real-time activities needs accurate and reliable hydrological and hydraulic models as well as data-driven or Artificial Intelligence / machine learning models. New methods are also needed to comprehensively evaluate the benefits and co-benefits for the environment and society.

Successful implementation and upscaling of Nature-Based Solutions is largely dependent on national policies, sustainable financing and business models, insurance schemes, governance structure as well as public participation and stakeholders’ involvement (i.e., co-creation). Along with this, institutional arrangements, stakeholder perceptions, ethics, environmental and social justice, understanding of barriers, public awareness and education as well as training and technology transfer are equally important.

Future prospects concerning Nature-Based Solutions will combine new ideas, concepts, research results, and practical experiences in cross-disciplinary fields of water engineering, public health and human well-being, environmental and social science and governance. Furthermore, new developments coming from the fields of robotics, IoT, integration of data and models through Digital Twins, augmented/virtual/mixed reality, as well as the impacts of new standards will also shape the future of Nature-Based Solutions.