Image credit: Unsplash/David Clode
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, 2018) as “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously benefiting people and nature”. Among the mentioned societal challenges, climate change adaptation represents a key role and is a significant lever to promote and justify the implementation of NbS. Moreover, it has been widely accepted that there is an inextricable link between biodiversity degradation and climate change manifestation. In this context, high quality NbS are now considered as relevant solutions to simultaneously address both challenges.
Therefore, the objective of the proposed special issue is to collect and valorize research works related to NbS as climate change adaptation solutions.
To address this topic in its diversity and plurality, this special issue considers all type of ecosystems: urban, cropland and pastures, marine and coastal, mountainous, forest, rivers and lakes, and wetlands. Depending on the ecosystem, NbS can act to minimize the associated social and economic negative impacts of the following threats: changes in water cycle (floods, droughts, water quality, water availability), sea level rise (flooding and erosion of coastal areas), rise in temperatures (heat waves, forest fires, local pollution, energy consumption, snowmelt), plant stress and increase of pests (variation of yields, forest dieback).
This plurality makes NbS complex and cross-sectoral in nature. Consequently, their success depends on multi-level and cross-sectoral collaboration. To consider all these aspects, this special issue promotes systemic (numerous interactions in some complex ecosystems), multidisciplinary (scientific, societal, political, economic and cultural fields), and multi-scale (spatial scales with the integration of NbS in their environment, and temporal scales considering sustainability over time and intermittency of bio-physical processes) approaches.
As sciences are required to better understand the functioning and prove the relevancy of NbS, the assessment of the ecosystem services they provide for climate adaptation purposes is particularly in the scope of this collection. This includes contributions putting forward case studies, methods and tools (including measurement, modelling and indicators) carried out to evaluate the sustainability of these NbS performances in a more resilient framework.
Guest Editors
Pierre-Antoine Versini, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, HM&Co, France
Amy Oen, Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), Norway
Natalia Rodriguez, French Biodiveristy Agency (OFB), France
Daniela Rizzi, ICLEI Europe, Germany
Submission Guidelines
Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Nature-Based Solutions for climate change adaptation" from the dropdown menu.
Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.
The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.