Climate Adaptation Solutions to Shore Up Coastal Ecosystems

As the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) opens today in Montreal, GCA’s Research for Impact team provides an update on its work and the potential of Nature-Based Solutions for climate change adaptation.

N early 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coast. Coastal environments are among the world’s most productive ecosystems, providing food, erosion and storm protection, employment and livelihoods, and they serve as habitats for plants and animals. However, these crucial ecosystems have been severely affected by the compounded impacts of climate change and human-induced changes, leading to increased coastal flooding and erosion.

Coastlines remain some of the most densely populated areas on Earth and many major world cities lie within low-elevation coastal zones. In China and Bangladesh, between 1990 and 2000, the low-elevation coastal zone population increased at around twice the national rate.

In Europe, more than 200 million citizens currently live within 50 km of the coastline, and current migration trends suggest that this number will continue to increase. This contributes both to increased human-induced pressures on coastal ecosystems and human vulnerability to climate change.

In an urgent effort to protect and restore natural habitats including coastal ecosystems, in June 2022 the European Commission (EC) adopted a proposal for a Nature Restoration Law. The EC aims to restore at least 20% of the European Union’s land and sea area by 2030 and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050 through legally binding targets and obligations that would complement existing domestic laws. Member States would also be required to develop National Restoration Plans to tailor targets to local contexts. In addition to this proposal, the EU’s Horizon Program within the European Green Deal aim to support the EU’s biodiversity strategy for 2030 through research and development fundings.

The need for integrated coastal zone management approaches that involve climate adaptation, biodiversity restoration, and human well-being has cast the spotlight on Ecosystem-based or Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) in recent years.

The term NbS covers initiatives that work alongside natural processes to create resilient ecosystems and provide additional benefits to coastal habitats and communities. They help reduce exposure to climate risks, such as coastal flooding, storm surges, and coastal erosion, while reinforcing collective and individual adaptive capacity, through ecosystem services delivery and enhanced empowerment in resource management.

Among NbS, ecosystem restoration is recognized as an essential protective option in the adaptation toolkit, but has yet to be implemented at scale.

To support the uptake of NbS for adaptation, the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) joined the teams contributing to the EU Restoration Law and EU-funded Large scale RESToration of COASTal Ecosystems through rivers to sea connectivity (REST-COAST) project.

Implemented by an international consortium of 38 partners, including scientists and policy experts, the REST-COAST project aims to show to what extent upscaled coastal restoration may function as a low-carbon adaptative resilience solution.

Based on evidence from nine pilot restoration demos across the Baltic, Black, North, Atlantic and Mediterranean Seas, the research aims to define innovative adaptation pathways while delving into the interconnected dynamics of technology, governance, finance, and scaling policy.

GCA will draw lessons from project pilots (see the map below) to accelerate knowledge and investments in NbS for adaptation-through-restoration. These insights will help build adaptive management pathways integrating innovative governance systems that support stakeholder involvement toward just and sustainable transformation.

Because knowledge and solutions brokering is crucial for at-scale implementation, GCA will also contribute to disseminating the developed transformative tools across the international community to raise awareness on coastal restoration benefits and support civil society empowerment.

The preliminary results from the analysis conducted on selected REST-COAST pilot case studies offer interesting insights regarding the project objectives.

There is no “one-size-fits-all” NbS for adaptive coastal restoration

NbS are not isolated technologies but rather innovation processes that combine infrastructure and ecosystem services to improve their functionality and transform current systems. The NbS for ecosystem restoration implemented by the REST-COAST pilots range from bio-inspired seagrass in the Arcachon Bay in France to the construction of an artificial island in the Vistula Lagoon on the Baltic Sea. They are linked to other grey, green, and/or blue measures depending on the targeted ecosystem services.

Replicating successful NbS in other contexts should be part of a collaborative decision-making process integrating the different points of view of users, policymakers, researchers, and engineers, among others. One important question is how to govern these ad-hoc innovations for adaptation, especially when the aim is to scale them up. Further work is also required on how to better mobilize technical skills, organizational capabilities, and financial resources of the private sector, for whom solutions are aimed.

Public authorities remain key actors within NbS policy networks, but a wide range of actors are involved as well

In all selected case studies, local government authorities are the main initiators of the projects. When they are not, a national authority is. Sources of funding are also mainly public, even though they come from various administrative levels – European, national, and subnational. Therefore, decision-makers are not necessarily funders, and greater clarity is required surrounding the information and financial flows across actors during the project cycle.

More work is also needed to understand how adaptation framings could ensure local ownership, for instance through more actor-centered approaches in line with the Locally-led Adaptation (LLA) Principles. Available empirical evidence shows that decentralized and community-based action is critical to the success of NbS implementation. LLA recognizes local indigenous knowledge on the complex interdependencies within socio-ecological systems and can help empower marginalized communities to design and implement solutions that respond to their needs.

The road from measures to solutions is long and winding, and adaptive planning is required to face deep uncertainty

Rapid and uncertain changes in climatic and socioeconomic conditions make adaptation options evolve across the maladaptation-adaptation continuum. In response, the REST-COAST pilots have defined adaptation pathways that help by grounding short-term actions in a longer-term perspective. To bridge gaps between planning and implementation, GCA will seek to better understand barrier dynamics and define enablers for transformative change, through a multidimensional and connecting perspective around governance, finance, technology, and scaling.

A better developed knowledge base is needed to draw clear conclusions from the pilots to catalyze policy change. As they progress, new layers of evidence will add to the knowledge available today to confirm or amend initial findings. GCA will keep working across the science-policy-practice interface to ensure the sustained uptake at scale of successful adaptation solutions deriving from the pilots.
 
 

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