Let’s recap the 25th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change celebrated in Madrid, gathering thousands of attendants from all over the world at the fastest prepared conference ever. NAIAD project and WWF hosted a joint session to present several interesting initiatives to help push NBS for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
NAIAD’s project manager and ICATALIST colleague Laura Vay presented H2020 NAIAD project, a 3.5 years’ project composed of 23 partners and coordinated by Confederación Hidrográfica del Duero. NAIAD will finish next May 2020 and is ready to show the results on assessing and operationalizing the insurance value of nature through the implementation of nature based solutions (NBS) for disaster risk reduction. Laura presented the project objectives, approaches and cases studies distributed across different scales all over Europe.
These cases, spanning from a football stadium in Rotterdam to the whole Thames basin in the UK, have tested NAIAD’s approach to designing NBS strategies aimed at reducing the risk of floods or droughts, and assessing their economic, social and biophysical impacts. Some of the results of NAIAD’s demos can be found in the case study descriptions at NAIAD’s website under demo cases: http://naiad2020.eu/demo-cases/
The session, hosted by WWF-Spain, was led by Eva Hernández, who presented WWF’s initiatives to support and promote the implementation of NBS for nature conservation all over the world. A wide array of successful examples in which restoration of natural functions of ecosystems has brought a solution to several problems, such as water pollution, heat islands or loss of biodiversity.