Report from World Water Week: Nature-Based Solutions for Water Security
Four key learnings from a SIWI seminar at World Water Week, 2022, which aimed to understand how enhanced ecosystem services can be valued, financed, and scaled.
The term Nature-based Solutions (NbS) refers to the sustainable management and use of natural features and processes to tackle socio-environmental challenges in general, and climate change in particular. These solutions are ‘inspired and supported by nature’, cost-effective, and simultaneously provide environmental, social, and economic benefits and help build resilience.
Examples of NbS include the restoration of mangroves along coasts to moderate the impact of waves and wind on coastal settlements or, green roofs or walls in cities to mitigate heat stress and act as carbon sinks while enhancing biodiversity or creating ‘room for the river’ for flood protection. Decentralised, small-scale solutions based on science can be owned by local communities that participate in all aspects of projects from planning to operation.
The SIWI seminar jointly co-convened by Inter-American Development Bank, Femsa Foundation, ATREE, and Rainmatter Foundation at World Water Week, 2022, aimed to understand how enhanced ecosystem services can be valued, financed, and scaled.
Some learnings from the session.
First, the effectiveness of Nature-based Solutions in building resilience is contingent on careful problem identification.
Often, NbS projects are approached solution first; whereas what is needed is ‘root-cause analyses’, followed by systematic identification of interventions that can address the critical issues. Here, we have an evidence gap problem. We don’t necessarily know how effective solutions will be in a specific local context in, for instance, removing contaminants or reducing flooding by a specific percentage. So, it is difficult to make the case for them vis-à-vis traditional engineering solutions.
Second, today, by and large, nature-based solutions remain experimental in nature and implemented using philanthropic money.
For NbS to become mainstream, they must get embedded in major government programs with professional project implementation. For this to happen, the financing bottleneck will need to be addressed. For projects to get financed, in addition to being proven to be effective in addressing issues at the local level, we need numbers on economics. What are the costs and what is the value of the services provided? While there are some benchmarks for capital costs, a notable gap is a poor understanding of the operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses needed for such projects.
Another interesting argument was that it may not always be maximising profit. One of the major benefits of NbS may be in minimising the risks of extreme events, which may not be well quantified.
Third, there are emerging innovative tools that help demonstrate both efficacy and value, which need to be tested and improved.
Such tools are instrumental in providing decision-makers and investors with the necessary information to evaluate options. We are getting better at enabling financing through new valuation tools like WaterProof ROI that aims to provide a rapid and indicative NbS investment portfolio and associated ROI.
Fourth, the scalability of NbS will require implementing ‘green’ and ‘grey’ infrastructure in a complementary manner, and building a new cadre of professionals and an innovation ecosystem.
At the moment, the standards and benchmarks needed to sign ‘service level agreements’ are absent. The large engineering and procurement contractors that typically undertake such infrastructure projects are hesitant to sign on. If we want to integrate NbS into planning in the long run, we will need a whole cadre of professionals — consultants, contractors, and M&E specialists.
While there was overall a lot of optimism for Nature-based Solutions, there were also concerns. Two concerns, in particular, were noteworthy: the benefits of NbS for marginalised communities are unlikely to be automatic. Projects will still need to be designed to be inclusive. Further, NbS involve (by definition) using plants/trees to achieve what has traditionally been achieved through engineering ‘grey’ infrastructure. These solutions could be slower, taking up to a generation for benefits to materialise. The question is do we as a society have the patience (and the patient capital) to invest?
