How can I contribute to the general awareness of the advantages of implementing NBS?

Overview

Mainstreaming is what happens when an approach stops being a project and becomes the ordinary way of doing things. This part of the guide collects what NAIAD produced to contribute to that shift in climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction: the analysis of where Nature Based Solutions already sit in European policy, the evidence of what they deliver, and the recommendations on what would have to change for them to be used as a matter of course.

Where Nature Based Solutions already sit in policy

Nature Based Solutions are not absent from European policy. They appear in the water framework, in flood risk management, in biodiversity and nature restoration commitments, in climate adaptation obligations and in cohesion and agricultural funding. What is usually missing is not a legal basis but an operational route: a policy that names an approach without establishing who is responsible for delivering it, how it is paid for, and how it is counted.

The mapping of insurance value in EU policy frames examines where the concept is already recognised and where it is not, and identifies the points in the policy cycle at which it could be introduced. The same analysis runs across the international, European and national levels, because an approach that is encouraged at one level and unrewarded at another will not be adopted at either.

What the project recommends

The recommendations follow from what the project found rather than from principle. Where the barrier is that the evidence does not exist at the scale a decision requires, the recommendation is about the evidence. Where the barrier is that the beneficiary cannot be identified, the recommendation is about the accounting. Where the barrier is that a responsibility exists with no budget attached to it, the recommendation is about the assignment of the budget. Each is specific to the actor it addresses, which is what makes it actionable.

The demonstrations matter to this argument as much as the recommendations do. Nine sites, with different hazards and different institutional settings, showing the assessment carried through to a financing arrangement is a stronger contribution to general awareness than any statement of the case in the abstract, and the material is presented so that a reader can follow one site from its problem to its proposed arrangement.

Contributing to awareness

For an organisation that wants to contribute to awareness rather than to policy, the project's communication material, its public deliverables and its demonstration case descriptions are all available for reuse, and they are written to be understood by a reader who is not a specialist in the field. The most effective contribution is usually local: a case that a decision-maker can recognise as their own situation, assessed with methods that they could apply themselves.