About Nature-based Solutions and climate adaptation
Climate change is causing a wide array of impacts around the world, such as sea-level rise, increased climate variability, and more frequent or intense droughts, floods, and wildfires. These impacts have increasingly severe social and economic consequences, with adaptation needs particularly urgent inlow and lower middle-income nationsandSmall Island Developing States, as they are experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change and have lower adaptive capacity.
Healthy ecosystems provide importantecosystem servicesthat can contribute to climate change adaptation. For example, healthy mangrove ecosystems provide protection from the impacts of climate change, often for some of the world's most vulnerable people, by absorbing wave energy and storm surges, adapting to rising sea levels, and stabilizing shorelines fromerosion. EbA focuses on benefits that humans derive frombiodiversity and ecosystem servicesand how these benefits can be used for managing risk to climate change impacts.
EbA involves theconservation,sustainable managementandrestoration of ecosystems, such asforests,grasslands,wetlands,mangrovesorcoral reefsto reduce the harmful impacts of climate hazards including shifting patterns or levels of rainfall, changes in maximum and minimum temperatures, stronger storms, and increasingly variable climatic conditions. EbA measures can be implemented on their own or in combination with engineered approaches (such as the construction ofwater reservoirsor dykes), hybrid measures (such asartificial reefs) and approaches thatstrengthen the capacitiesof individuals and institutions to addressclimate risks(such as the introduction ofearly warning systems).
ϲʿֱֳ work on EbA
Since 2009, ϲʿֱֳ has promoted the use of EbA as aforaddressing the impacts of climate change on people and their environment.
In its work on EbA, ϲʿֱֳ has achieved: