Greening roofs or walls to cool down city areas during summer, to capture storm water, to abate pollution, and to increase human well-being while enhancing biodiversity: nature-based solutions (NBS ...

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Nature-based Solutions : New Influence for Environmental Management and Research in Europe

https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_92B5E056096D.P001/REF.pdf

Core principles for successfully implementing and upscaling Nature-based Solutions

The sustainable production of bioenergy is vital to avoiding negative impacts on environmental goods such as climate, soil, water, and especially biodiversity. We propose three key issues that should be addressed in any biodiversity risk-mitigation strategy: conservation of areas of significant biodiversity value; mitigation of negative effects related to indirect land-use change; and promotion of agricultural practices with few negative impacts on biodiversity. Focusing on biodiversity concerns, we compared principles and criteria set to address biodiversity and other environmental and social issues in seven standards (defined here as commodity-based standards or roundtables, or relevant European legislation): five voluntary initiatives related to bioenergy feedstocks, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (United Kingdom), and the European Renewable Energy Source Directive. Conservation of areas of significant biodiversity value was fairly well covered by these standards. Nevertheless, mitigation of negative impacts related to indirect land-use change was underrepresented. Although the EU directive, with its bonus system for the use of degraded land and a subquota system for noncrop biofuels, offered the most robust standards to mitigate potential negative effects, all of the standards fell short in promoting agricultural practices with low negative impacts on biodiversity. We strongly recommend that each standard be benchmarked against related standards, as we have done here, and that efforts should be made to strengthen the elements that are weak or missing. This would be a significant step toward achieving a bioenergy industry that safeguards Earth's living heritage.

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The power of bioenergy-related standards to protect biodiversity.

This paper presents the co-learning process outcomes based on Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). EbA principles are directly associated with resilience improvement that depends on NbS for change of patterns and actions. Basically, we expected to explore how urban systems can be improved avoiding environmental degradation (i.e. waste ecosystem services and their benefits). Therefore, distinct scenarios were proposed with specific objectives: (1) identification of barriers and challenges; (2) identification of opportunities for NbS implementation. Throughout a workshop, we had chance to discuss knowledge gaps and potential emerging research such as: (1) synergies between DRR and EbA; (2) a long-term perspective of ecosystem management; (3) dynamic of DRR and the natural processes involved considering the complexity of NbS. We conclude that existing measures are limited in their ecological focus regarding to DRR and benefits they address. For this reason, a more comprehensive approach to support NbS and its systematic mainstreaming is required.

The role of nature-based solutions in disaster risk reduction: The decision maker's perspectives on urban resilience in São Paulo state

This research aims to explore the potentials of nature-based solutions (NbS) to mitigate the socio-economic pressures rising from tourism development within protected natural areas. Paper delivers a tourism studies perspective exclusively, by reviewing publications published between 2008 and 2018 in leading tourism and hospitality journals. The content analysis results support conclusions that each of the tourism development dimensions, i.e. governance, management and conservation, capacity building, visitor management and monitoring, sustainable financing and green infrastructure, can be related to at least one of the NbS approaches via conceptual or implemented measures. Moreover, tourism development in protected areas supports the new perspective of NbS, encompassing intangible governmental interventions. Additionally, the term nature-based solutions has not been established in tourism literature yet. The literature review provides an in-depth understanding of the role of NbS in sustainable tourism development within protected natural areas and suggests a future research agenda for scholars and practitioners. The major limitation of this study is a restriction on journal selection.

F. Boltz

Papers

A climate for life: meeting the global challenge.