Nature-based solutions for climate adaptation

Bringing nature into cities through planting trees; reintroducing species into an environment, creating urban gardens or green roofs; protecting forests and wetlands; and restoring coastal ecosystems, such as mangroves and reefs, to provide natural barriers against coastal erosion while supporting local fisheries, are all examples of how nature-based solutions can contribute to building regional resilience to climate change.

Climate adaptation is one of five priorities of the EU Missions and EIT Climate-KIC is leading a consortium of organisations working on Pathways2Resilience, a project funded by Horizon Europe to support 100 regions in their journey towards climate resilience. We talked to Fernando Diaz Lopez, project lead of Pathways2Resilience, about how transformative climate adaptation in European regions could look like.

“Wetlands in Europe have dramatically been degraded in the last few years, but there are currently a lot of projects focusing on their restoration, not only because of their value in terms of eco-tourism and boosting attractiveness of a town, but crucially because they help mitigate flooding and erosion caused by heavy rainfall events while supporting biodiversity,” says Diaz Lopez.

He adds: “Agricultural regions in Europe are also starting to change the way they grow their crops, from intensive farming techniques relying on machinery and fertilisers, to using more agroecological practices that integrate trees, shrubs, and other vegetation, in combination with mulching and precision agriculture”.

These practices don’t just have a positive impact on soils, helping restoring their health and locking in more carbon, but on multiple components of food systems, from animal welfare, to healthier diets, to income diversification for farming communities.

While many such interventions are already taking place across Europe today, the challenge is that these actions are not coordinated, happening simultaneously but in isolation. This systemic transformation to align, harmonise and scale up these actions is what the Pathways2Resilience project aims to tackle.

Connecting the dots: from individual local actions to pan-European regional resilience

“EIT Climate-KIC’s approach, which we experimented with our Deep Demonstration projects, is to look at the issue from a systemic point of view. We won’t just look at watersheds to increase water quality, and decide to build more of them to reduce the risk of floods. What we’ll do is to look at their surrounding and ask ourselves, what is the ecosystem health and biodiversity, the economic activities and social demographics around the watershed, how are they connected, and what actions are needed to transform the whole system for the better” explains Diaz Lopez.

This is what the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change calls ‘enabling conditions’. There are technological, political, organisational, and behavioural factors in each territory or ecosystem that interact with one another. EIT Climate-KIC’s aim is to develop a series of connected, mutually-reinforcing interventions (or ‘portfolios’ of actions) that can have a transformative impact on a place or community.

Diaz Lopez adds: “In this case, we can’t dissociate the need for watershed restoration from the socio-economic elements in that area. This isn’t just an environmental or climate issue, it’s also about the people living in this place and about the governance, and it’s about creating together not only the vision they have of what would be their ideal future, but also concretely planning the steps needed to achieve it.”

Through €21 million in sub-grants, the Pathways2Resilience project will help 100 regional authorities and local communities in Europe to prepare a tailored climate resilience strategy, by supporting them in creating an action plan complete with a portfolio of innovation projects and finance mechanisms for their transformative climate resilience journey.

“We will support regional decision-makers to connect with possible solution providers, universities and other local entities that will contribute to those plans and portfolios. In addition, the Pathways2Resilience project will look at what is actually financeable, both in the short and long term” says Diaz Lopez.

Regions and communities are best positioned to act on transformative climate adaptation

Many climate adaptation programmes and projects are funded or initiated at the national and supranational level. But the EU believes in the potential of regions and local communities to become the key actors in this challenge, as they know better their environment, their citizens, and there is usually a good level of trust already established among people behind local projects.

“Pathways2Resilience is a 60-month project, so it will be a marathon, rather than a sprint,” says Diaz Lopez. He continues: “We will be looking at increasing the preparedness of regions and territories, as well as supporting local agencies and administrations in their capacity to anticipate, absorb, adapt, transform and implement that change.

We’re going to do so in very concrete ways, for example with a self-assessment tool that any region or local community can use to understand their maturity in climate resilience. We will also run climate finance and business model labs that will help regions understand how they can fund their adaptation projects. Through a series of workshops and webinars, we’ll be looking at how to finance a series of interconnected interventions, or portfolio of innovative actions, that answers a region’s specific context and needs. Finally, the programme will create an interactive, step-by-step toolbox that will support regions in implementing transformative solutions in practice.”

One pitfall that this project wants to avoid is to work only with the regions and local decision-makers who are already well-aware of the need to prepare for climate change. Pathways2Resilience has therefore launched an expression of interest campaign to reach as many European regions as possible, at different climate adaptation stages.

“We will work with a number of regions that have the required political commitment, as well as mandate and ability to act, but we also need to identify regions and communities in Europe with high vulnerability. The project is going to allocate a total of €21 million in funding, and this could be a game-changer for regions that need a kickstart in their transformative resilience journey. Everybody that is legally constituted and meets the eligibility conditions under Horizon Europe will be able to participate and request this funding,” says Diaz Lopez.

EIT Climate-KIC will present Pathways2Resilience and share our perspectives on finance for climate adaptation at the European Climate Change Adaptation (ECCA) conference, taking place in Dublin between19 and 21 June.

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