Alexandr Iscenco (ELP 2013) | Nature Based Solutions Project Officer, IUCN Regional Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Moldova
Nowadays, with the ever-present challenges and threats of the continuously intensifying climate change, which causes significant property damage and losses of lives all over the world, people naturally prioritize their own wellbeing and welfare, as well as the ones of their close ones. When you suffer from an extreme heatwave or when your house is at constant risk of being ruined by flooding, you do not really think about all the other living beings around you, who also experience these effects of climate change. Furthermore, to deal with these issues, you commonly seek solutions that offer relief as fast and efficiently as possible. Thus, in many cases, people prioritize technical and technological responses to climate risks and threats. And in such a way, in our attempts to survive and thrive in the current conditions, we distance ourselves from nature even more.
Nevertheless, technical, and technological solutions, which are also called ‘grey infrastructure,’ can be costly, especially in their maintenance over time. They can also be quite rigid, with little to no adaptation potential to the increasingly unpredictable manifestations of climate change. Finally, yet importantly, these solutions commonly tackle only an extremely specific societal challenge or a very narrow set of these challenges at most.
To deal with these and other limitations of the ‘grey infrastructure,’ instead of distancing ourselves from nature, we can work in partnership with nature for mutual benefits. Namely, by leveraging the processes, functions, and services of healthy natural ecosystems, we can address both societal challenges and biodiversity loss issues simultaneously, while also getting a set of additional benefits in the meantime. This partnership with nature aimed at the provision of both human well-being and biodiversity gains is commonly referred to as nature-based solutions.
The term ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NbS) was coined and promoted by IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature, in 2009. Since then, NbS are defined by IUCN as ‘actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural and modified ecosystems in ways that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, to provide both human well-being and biodiversity benefits’ (IUCN, 2016). Besides this concept and its definition, in 2020, IUCN also came with a tool to inform the design, implementation and evaluation of NbS projects – the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions. And speaking about recent events, as part of the ENACT Partnership, which stands for Enhancing Nature-based Solutions for an Accelerated Climate Transformation, IUCN presented NbS with its recommendations for implementing and financing such solutions at the Sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 16).
Talking more about the design and practical implementation of NbS, these solutions can take a variety of forms. In urban context, NbS can be represented by green roofs on buildings, urban gardens, specially created or restored wetlands, urban forests and forested parks, green corridors connecting these areas, etc. In a rural environment, the solutions can range from agroforestry plantations, forested strips along and through farmlands, riparian buffer strips along rivers, resource-saving agricultural practices with cover crops and crop rotations, and others.
With all these things and many others, I am actively learning and practicing at my new job as a Nature-based Solutions project officer at the IUCN Regional Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Specifically, several of my new colleagues and I are working on landscape-restoration-and-NbS-focused projects, such as the Food System, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR) project in the Republic of Uzbekistan. There we explore the possibilities of restoring degraded agricultural lands and improving conservation of natural habitats and biodiversity in several protected areas via landscape restoration interventions and NbS practices.
If you are interested in the topic of Nature-based Solutions and the work of IUCN in this direction, feel free to contact me by email alexandr.iscenco@iucn.org. You can also explore this topic and how it is approached and implemented in practice by IUCN at the IUCN website. Finally, if you would like to work on NbS or similar environmental topics, you can explore what IUCN has to offer on the organization’s job portal.
Blog photos provided by blog author, Alexandr Iscenco.