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NbS for climate change adaptation

Even if humanity limits the global temperature increase, feedbacks and inertia in the global climate system mean that adaptation is essential.

While the default approach to addressing human adaptation to climate change involves engineered interventions, carefully designed nature-based solutions in a range of ecosystems can work with and sometimes improve upon these approaches and can generally do so at lower economic cost once the broader benefits of NbS are taken into account. Using global and regional systematic reviews together with on-the-ground empirical work, our research examines the role of NbS in:

  1. Reducing exposure to the immediate impacts of climate change.
  2. Lowering social sensitivity to climate impacts by supporting diversification of sources of food and income.
  3. Building adaptive capacity through the process of designing, implementing and managing nature-based interventions.

We are particularly interested in for whom NbS bring benefits in a rapidly warming world, and the mechanisms linking human and ecological resilience.

Associated projects