Community-based system for NBS monitoring and assessment

Description

Measures that depend on living systems have to be watched. A community-based monitoring system (CMBS) is a structured way of doing that with the people who live and work in the catchment, rather than with an instrument network that no one maintains after the project closes.

The system defines what is observed, by whom, how often and in what form it is recorded, and it links the observations to the co-benefits that the strategy was justified by. It is built on the recognition that the stakeholders who took part in designing an intervention are also the ones best placed to notice whether it is behaving as expected — and that their observations carry weight in later decisions precisely because they are not the project's own.

The platform and its deployment were developed and tested at the NAIAD demonstration sites, and the approach connects directly to the community monitoring work carried out with stakeholders in the Lower Danube, Glinščica and Medina del Campo catchments.

Applications to decision making in the insurance sector

A risk carrier that has recognised a prevention measure needs evidence that the measure is still performing. Community-based monitoring is a low-cost way to obtain that evidence between formal assessments, and it also produces the local record of what actually happened during an event — which is often the only record available for a small catchment.

Added value of this modelling approach

It makes monitoring affordable and continuous rather than occasional and expensive. It also builds the local constituency for the measure: people who monitor an intervention have an interest in its maintenance, which addresses directly the operations-and-maintenance question that otherwise stalls NBS implementation.

What decision can be improved with this modelling approach

Whether a measure should be maintained, modified or replaced; whether a strategy's co-benefits are materialising as predicted; and whether the evidence base is strong enough to extend a scheme to a neighbouring catchment.