Research priorities for marine and coastal Nature-based Solutions (NBS)

Reproduced from O’Leary et al 2023.

Research priorities for marine and coastal Nature-based Solutions (NBS)

A core goal of the project MaCoBioS is to develop innovative research pathways and provide evidence-based guidance for marine policy formulation on Nature-Based Solutions (NBS).

In delivering this goal, we recently brought together twenty-one researchers from a breadth of scientific disciplines to identify research priorities for advancing understanding and informing implementation of marine and coastal NBS. Led by MaCoBioS researchers Dr Bethan O’Leary at the University of Exeter and Dr Catarina Fonseca at the University of the Azores, this collaborative work was supported by other members of the MaCoBioS team together with researchers from two other EU Horizon 2020 projects ‘Climate Change and Future Marine Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity’ (FutureMARES) and ‘Large scale RESToration of COASTal ecosystems through rivers to sea connectivity’ (REST-COAST).

Our three research priorities

To date, NBS have been largely studied for terrestrial – particularly urban – systems, with limited uptake thus far in marine and coastal areas. Yet, marine and coastal systems are of immense value to people and nature, face unprecedented risks from climate change and human impacts, and NBS offer a powerful strategy to reduce direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. We have therefore proposed three key interrelated research priorities for advancing NBS understanding and informing implementation in marine and coastal areas:

Biodiversity and ecosystem science: improve understanding of marine and coastal biodiversity-ecosystem services relationship. Our world is rapidly changing, and we need to understand risks to biodiversity and new opportunities for better management. Advancing knowledge on links between marine and coastal biodiversity, ecosystem health, vulnerability, functions, and services will help us do this and make us better placed to maximise the effectiveness of NBS as they are deployed.

Implementation guidance: provide scientific guidance on how and where to implement marine and coastal NBS and better coordinate across NBS strategies and projects. By improving our understanding of which marine and coastal NBS offer the greatest value, and how and where to implement and coordinate strategies for them, we can better implement management and help overcome barriers to NBS implementation.

People-centric research and action: develop ways to enhance marine and coastal NBS communication, collaboration, ocean literacy and stewardship. People are a critical part of the natural world and we need to better integrate and engage with local communities and other stakeholders in research and management to raise awareness, boost buy-in and increase societal benefits of NBS.

Embracing NBS in marine and coastal areas for transformative change

These are a broad set of priorities intrinsically linked to each other that go far beyond what one project can deliver. Collaboration between researchers and practitioners will be key and we need to concentrate investment and research efforts to move forwards with marine and coastal NBS design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Moving forward, MaCoBioS hopes that these research priorities can help inspire new research that operates with the same holistic approach as NBS – creating actionable science that embeds people and nature and helps us embrace NBS in the science, policy and practice of managing marine and coastal ecosystems for tangible benefits to people and marine life.

The full citation of the paper is: O’Leary BC, Fonseca C, Cornet CC, de Vries MB, Degia AK, Failler P, Furlan E, Garrabou J, Gil A, Hawkins JP, Krause-Jensen D, Le Roux X, Peck MA, Pérez G, Queirós AM, Różyński G, Sanchez-Arcilla A, Simide R, Sousa Pinto I, Trégarot E, Roberts CM. (2023) Embracing Nature-based Solutions to promote resilient marine and coastal ecosystems. Nature-Based Solutions 3:100044.

The full paper can be found here.

Text by Bethan O’Leary and Catarina Fonseca

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WORKING TOGETHER TO MOVE FORWARDS WITH NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS

WORKING TOGETHER TO MOVE FORWARDS WITH NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS

MaCoBioS and CMCC were excited to welcome participants from across the Mediterranean to Lecce, Italy on the 29thand 30th September 2022 to discuss how we can identify spatial opportunities for marine and coastal Nature-based Solutions.

Our goal was to bring together policy-makers and practitioners who are working to improve management of marine and coastal ecosystems through nature-based approaches and provide a forum to foster learning, explore current and future challenges faced by management, and consider solutions. Here is the host and coordinator, Elisa Furlan, giving a short overview of the workshop.

The agenda was packed. Thought-provoking presentations, in-depth discussions, a trip to the Torre Guaceto Marine Protected Area, tasty food, and lots of sharing of ideas. Our conversations were focused around how we can better manage cumulative risks from human activities and climate change in marine and coastal spaces and inform decisions about where NBS could be targeted. A common theme that ran through all our discussions was the urgent need to reduce direct human pressures on marine and coastal ecosystems where they occur prior to other actions. Without doing so, the effectiveness of any other form of management, such as restoration actions, would be limited. There were lots of interesting discussions about balancing pragmatism and opportunity with application of predictive models that can offer more strategic direction. We also discussed what such models should contain and how they should be communicated. Displayed below is a brief synopsis of the workshop.In the end, we were happy with the positive feedback received from participants, who found the workshop interesting and highlighted the importance of these events.

We’d like to thank all of the people who made our workshop a success by giving their time and valuable insights which helped shape this important dialogue and tool development.

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Text by Elisa Furlan, Bethan O’Leary and Catarina Fonseca

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What is marine coastal ecological restoration?

What is marine coastal ecological restoration?

Human activities, as well as climatic disasters, are degrading natural habitats, which negatively impacts the entire ecosystem (i.e., the habitat and its associated living organisms of which humans are a part). Such a damaged ecosystem can return to its native state if a restoration program is implemented. This recovery can happen faster and be more effective if the damage to the ecosystem is not too important. For example, a mangrove forest can be replanted after deforestation caused by its use in firewood. Moreover, a damaged seagrass meadow can be restored by transplantation of plants from a different location. More generally, the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER, 2004) has defined ecological restoration as a “process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed”.

Figure 1: Transplantation of Cymodocea a seagrass specie.

The importance of ecological restoration

Ecological restoration projects are now coming to the forefront of sustainable development issues such that the United Nations (UN) has declared the current decade (2021-2030) as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. At the same time, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Environment Programme(UNEP), in partnership with 10 African and Asian countries, have joined forces to create The Restoration Initiative (TRI), with the aim of “bridging the gap between restoration ambition and tangible progress on the ground.” The Society for Ecological Restoration has further defined 8 principles to guide the implementation of restoration projects. Each project must involve all of the chosen ecosystem’s stakeholders and therefore rely on various knowledge sources (i.e., practitioner knowledge, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Local Ecological Knowledge, and scientific discovery). The project must build on reference ecosystems while accounting for environmental changes and thus support the natural restoration processes of the ecosystem. In addition, the project must be evaluated against clear objectives using measurable indices, allowing the highest level of restoration to be targeted. Finally, the restoration action must gain cumulative value when applied on a large scale and thus be part of a continuum of restorative activities. If this last principle is followed in addition to the other ones, ecological restoration could then also be considered a Nature-based Solution as it contributes to protecting biodiversity and improving human wellbeing when implemented effectively and sustainably.

Figure 2 : The eight principles for Ecological Restoration (SER, 2019)

The challenges we need to address

One of the main challenges in restoration projects is to define the historical baseline towards which the restoration tends. Moreover, it is difficult to achieve a large scale or real continuum due to the large anthropization of Nature. This is all even more true in coastal marine habitats, where restoration technics are also less advanced due to the technological challenge the marine environment often represent.

As ecological restoration can be defined as a Nature-based Solution under certain condition develop above, the MaCoBioS project will consider ecological restoration as a possible solution in its way to propose different kind of Nature-based Solution to conserve, manage and restore marine coastal area in a climate change situation.

Text by Géraldine Pérez, Rémy Simide and  Cindy Cornet

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What are Nature-Based Solutions ?

What are Nature-Based Solutions ?

The Nature-based Solution concept

Our societies are currently facing many challenges. Some are not new, such as food and water security, while others, more recent, are more directly linked to human activities, such as climate change. In this context, Nature-based Solutions, or NbS, provide solutions to these societal challenges by relying on what nature already provides. Several approaches that combine protection, management, and restoration of ecosystems already exist. The key novelty of the NbS concept is that such approaches must be beneficial to biodiversity while improving human well-being. For example, a mangrove forest fixes the coastline and thus protects it from possible flooding (which risk increases due to climate change), but it can also sequester four times more carbon than a rainforest per unit area. Therefore, protected, managed, or restored mangroves can help to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In addition, co-benefits in terms of biodiversity occur by providing habitat for numerous marine and terrestrial species.

Figure 1: Definition of NbS: From IUCN. (2020). Guidance for using the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions: a user-friendly framework for the verification, design and scaling u of NbS. Source: https://doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.CH.2020.08.en

The term NbS was clearly defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)[1] and the European Union (EU)[2] in an effort to bring together all ecosystem-related approaches already meeting this dual purpose of benefiting biodiversity and human well-being to answer to a societal challenge. This term is thus intended as an umbrella term.

What makes a Nature-based Solution?

The IUCN has defined 7 societal challenges to which NbS must respond: (1) climate change mitigation and adaptation, (2) food security, (3) water security, (4) disaster risk reduction, (5) human health, (6) economic and social development, and (7) environment degradation and biodiversity loss. In 2020, the IUCN has also published global standards that allow characterising protection, management, and restoration actions as NbS through 8 criteria. These criteria include the need to address at least one of the above societal challenges, as well as the benefit to biodiversity and human well-being through sustainable management and implementation. An NbS must also be designed at a large spatial (generally defined as land‑, freshwater- and seascape) and temporal scale (several decades) in partnership with all stakeholders for inclusive, sustainable, and integrated governance. In addition, this solution must be economically feasible and the positive effects quickly observable, but can also be adaptive, which makes its strength. Taking the example of a salt marsh that needs to be managed to limit the risk of flooding, one possible action is to plant and facilitate the development of vegetation capable of regulating the water flow. However, depending on the plant species, the growth of the plants can be more or less long. In this context, artificial management of the water flow can be set up so that positive effects on the scale of the first year can be observed while waiting for the natural action of the vegetation to be effective. Finally, to be recognised as an NbS, the effectiveness of the actions implemented and any land-use planning developed should be measurable. In this context, it is imperative to have tools capable of assessing the effectiveness of an NbS. These tools must be developed around scientific studies, based on in-depth knowledge of ecosystems and their services, as well as the links between biodiversity and environmental health in contexts of varying anthropic pressures. Further research is also needed to understand better the interconnection between biodiversity, climate change and provided services within ecosystems to recommend actions that could be an effective NbS in a specific area. 

Figure 2: The 8 criteria of the global standards for NbS published by the IUCN: From IUCN. (2020). Guidance for using the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions: a user-friendly framework for the verification, design and scaling u of NbS. Source: https://doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.CH.2020.08.en

The way ahead for marine and coastal Nature-based Solutions

NbS can apply to both natural and modified ecosystems (such as urban areas). Currently, most NbS have been identified in urban and terrestrial environments and agriculture sector, while natural marine environments and their specificities are less considered and very few NbS have been recorded. One of the main reasons is that it is more challenging to implement and then evaluate out of sight large-scale actions in the ocean. The lack of basic knowledge on ecological responses to marine ecosystem-based approaches in terms of ecosystem service provision or biodiversity gain is also an obstacle to proposing relevant NbS in the marine context. MaCoBioS thus aims to address these knowledge gaps and disseminate the principles and purpose of NbS to coastal marine ecosystems’ stakeholders.

[1] “Nature-based Solutions are actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits. They are underpinned by benefits that flow from healthy ecosystems and target major challenges like climate change, disaster risk reduction, food and water security, health and are critical to economic development.” Source: https://www.iucn.org/theme/nature-based-solutions/about

[2] The Commission defines nature-based solutions as: “Solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience. Such solutions bring more, and more diverse, nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes, through locally adapted, resource-efficient and systemic interventions.” Source: https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/environment/nature-based-solutions_en

Text by Géraldine Perez, Rémy Simide and Cindy Cornet

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