Valentina Jaramillo- NBRACER
Published On: August 20th, 20243.3 min read

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly being recognized as a viable alternative to traditional engineering approaches, offering numerous benefits and playing a crucial role in mitigating climate hazards. As climate change presents more challenges, the effort to comprehend and implement NbS is likely to grow. In fact, we already know that sea-level rise will likely lead to an increase in the frequency and severity of coastal flooding.

So, if the climate risks are so clear and the benefits of NbS so promising: why aren’t these solutions being adopted more broadly?

One of the primary challenges in promoting NbS is the difficulty in quantifying their benefits. Stakeholders and decision-makers are more likely to adopt these solutions when the benefits it provides are clearly articulated in quantitative terms. However, there is a significant gap in evidence regarding the efficiency of NbS, particularly in dynamic environments such as coastal areas, which are inherently complex due to extreme events and long-term coastal processes.

To address these challenges, the NBRACER project, which supports the implementation of the European Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, introduces an approach to accelerate the transition towards climate-resilient regions. The project uses demonstrating and replicating regions in the Atlantic biogeographical area to understand place-based and multiscale relations with the natural system, potential limitations, and tipping points. This is done by understanding the mechanisms through which ecosystem services are delivered and how their health and connectivity influence the provision of benefits.

In the context of coastal areas, a comprehensive understanding of the system must include the often-overlooked subsurface domain: the groundwater system. The main problem is that current design tools and models used to understand NbS often operate within isolated domains, failing to integrate interdisciplinary boundaries and multiple interactions between the coastal and groundwater systems. Thus, there is a need for a modeling environment that integrates diverse models at broader landscape scale and that considers challenges associated with environmental conditions in changing future.

“Landscapes evolve over time, and consequently, NbS must adapt to these changes. Therefore we need numerical models and an evaluation framework that can handle the temporal scale to predict how the landscape evolves and how the NbS behaves over time”

To illustrate the above mentioned, this research establishes a conceptual model to understand the main physical processes related to hydrodynamics, morphology, and groundwater dynamics in the coastal system of Terschelling, The Netherlands.

The island is located in the Wadden region, the largest unbroken system of sand and mud flats worldwide, which makes the region unique, but vulnerable. In the north, the island is exposed to the North Sea and protected by a large dune system. This system transitions into a low polder to the south, where the Wadden Sea is located, while the lateral boundaries of the system are tidal inlets with an extensive salt marsh area in the east side.

Sea level rise is threatening the island, both from the North sea and the Wadden sea. In addition, Dutch summers are getting drier and warmer, making freshwater shortages more frequent and winters are getting wetter, causing groundwater to regularly rise above ground level: many dune valleys are under the influence of temporary flooding and during dry summers the polder experiences saline seepage.

The island is facing multiple challenges associated to climate change and this holistic approach supports the understanding of the system and its interactions between climate-related hazards, proposed NbS, and the provided ecosystem services. This involves identifying relevant ecosystem indicators to evaluate NbS efficiency, and to monitor and predict changes in ecosystem services over time, particularly under varying climate change scenarios and at a landscape level.

Further stages of this research will involve the development of a process-based model for designing landscapes that integrate NbS. These NbS will be evaluated to determine their efficiency in tackling challenges such as coastal protection, drought mitigation, freshwater availability, and salinization. Subsequently, adaptation pathways will be formulated to accelerate the transition towards climate-resilient coasts.