An integrated approach to choose, implement and assess Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for risk management

Description

Most water resources problems cannot be solved by an engineering answer alone, nor by tackling only the governance, legal or financial side. This tool is the process that holds those strands together: an integrated collaborative modelling approach in which stakeholders and technical experts work on the same models, from the early stages of planning, so that the options being compared are the ones the participants understand and recognise.

The approach is built around meta-modelling — Fast Integrated Systems Modelling. Complex biophysical, economic, financial and social models are integrated and simplified into a fast, low-resolution dynamic model that runs in front of a room rather than overnight. Stakeholders take part in defining the interventions, the interactions and the feedback loops, and in co-designing the interface through which the results are read.

Collaborative modelling creates the enabling environment; the meta-model supplies the evidence. Together they allow a group to ask whether a proposed Nature Based Solution will solve the problem, how long it will take to reach the expected level of service, and who will be responsible for operation and maintenance — and to get an answer within the meeting.

The approach was implemented in NAIAD at the Medina del Campo demonstration site, where it produced a shared understanding of the problem and a widely accepted implementation strategy.

Applications to decision making in the insurance sector

Insurers and reinsurers decide on the basis of a risk estimate they did not produce themselves and cannot easily interrogate. A meta-model makes the chain from intervention to hazard to damage inspectable, and it does so in a form that a non-specialist board can follow. That is directly useful when a (re)insurer is asked to recognise a prevention measure in its pricing, or to consider contributing to the cost of one.

The approach also helps in the opposite direction: where a risk carrier has its own catastrophe model, collaborative modelling gives a structured way to reconcile its outputs with the local knowledge of the authorities and users who will live with the measure.

Added value of this modelling approach

It makes the assumptions visible. A conventional model produces a number; a collaboratively built meta-model produces a number together with the reasoning, the participants who supplied each part, and the disagreements that remain. That widens ownership of the result and shortens the distance between assessment and decision.

Because the meta-model is deliberately coarse and fast, it also makes uncertainty discussable. Participants can run scenarios themselves, including climate and socio-economic futures, and see how the ranking of options changes rather than being told a single preferred answer.

What decision can be improved with this modelling approach

The choice between competing NBS and hybrid green-grey strategies; the phasing of an adaptation plan when the budget arrives in instalments; the level of service to commit to and the operations and maintenance arrangement that goes with it; and the point at which a strategy is mature enough to be taken to an investor.