CHARACTERIZATION OF THE AREA

Overview

Before a Nature Based Solution can be modelled, valued or argued for, the area it sits in has to be described on terms that the models can use. The catchment characterization is the baseline step of the NAIAD assessment framework: it fixes what the demonstration area looks like today, so that every later claim about what an intervention changes is measured against a stated starting point rather than an assumption.

The characterization is deliberately two-sided. The biophysical half describes geology, soils, land cover, hydrology, wetlands and the current and projected climate. The socio-economic half describes who lives and works in the area, how land and water are used and allocated, what the area produces, and which institutions and rules govern those uses. Both halves are recorded for each of the nine NAIAD demonstration sites on the same template, which is what makes the cases comparable to one another at the end.

What it covers

The report works from a general background on the demonstration areas as living laboratories, through the methodology each work package will follow, into a detailed characterization of each site. For every demonstration area it records the geology and hydrogeology, the wetlands and their condition, water uses and their relative weight, current climate and climate projections, the hazards that have been identified and the data available to assess them, and the Nature Based Solutions that have been proposed locally. On the socio-economic side it records the stakeholder map, the institutional layers that hold decision-making power, and the factors that are expected to help or obstruct implementation.

The data assembled here is not a report for its own sake. It is the input that the process representation and modelling in the following task depends on: the hazard maps, the asset inventories, the damage functions and the valuation all inherit their spatial and socio-economic frame from this description. A gap at this stage becomes a modelling assumption later, so the characterization states where evidence is thin as well as where it is strong.

How it was produced

Each demonstration area was characterized by the project partner working there, with contributions from the teams responsible for hazard modelling and for socio-institutional assessment. The chapters were written in parallel during 2017 and assembled into a single report, so that inconsistencies between sites surfaced before the modelling began rather than after it. The result is a reference document that the other work packages cite when they describe their own assumptions.