Demystifying the benefits of nature-based solutions
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PetraDankers
Petra Dankers is a Leading Professional in Nature-based Solutions at Royal HaskoningDHV, with over 15 years of experience in the global water-related challenges of coastal and riverine areas. With a focus on robust design and engineering, Petra addresses climate change issues while considering safety, economics, and ecology.
Nature-based solutions present a powerful way to address climate-related risks, while simultaneously enhancing biodiversity and benefiting local communities. Unfortunately, they’re often dismissed as being too risky, or too expensive.
However, there’s a wealth of information now available that proves otherwise. Specifically, the World Bank’s guide to Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Resilience emphasises their importance and offers practical guidance on how to evaluate their benefits and make honest comparisons with traditional methods.
This article summarises the World Bank’s advice, providing expert insight into its recommendations, and diving into a real-world example from the report.
Practical steps to evaluate the benefits of nature-based solutions
It can be difficult to measure the advantages of nature-based solutions because they often include intangible impacts on factors like health, aesthetics, and social cohesion.
Knowledge about nature-based solutions is also often spread among developers, consultants, and engineers. So, without collaboration, people rarely have the expertise needed to accurately assess their impact and make a compelling business case for their inclusion in projects.
This hinders their widespread implementation. And when solutions are rarely used, it’s easy for this cycle to perpetuate.
To support the evaluation process, the World Bank has outlined six practical steps for assessing the benefits of nature-based solutions. These steps are designed to help you unlock more funding, design projects with better outcomes, and more easily measure the economic impacts of your investments.
Our Climate Resilience team bring the right people together, allowing us to incorporate new insights and the latest scientific knowledge to build resilient and nature-based projects for our clients.
Evaluating the risk reduction benefits of nature-based solutions
By following these steps, you can evaluate the expected impact of nature-based solutions and build more compelling cases for investment. But each project requires different knowledge and expertise. Evaluating the risk reduction of nature-based solutions can be especially difficult, and especially crucial to raising investment and winning support for your projects.The World Bank guidelines provide several approaches for evaluating risk reduction benefits, including a four-step guide to assessing avoided damages, which is an established approach used widely in World Bank projects.
You can use the same method to measure the benefits of traditional and nature-based solutions because they both offer risk reduction advantages. But nature-based solutions offer other rewards, too. So, you’ll also need to evaluate those to understand the true value of your project.
Evaluating the other benefits of nature-based solutions
The World Bank report provides a diverse set of economic methods, and some benefit-related indicators, for estimating the monetary and societal value of nature-based solutions.The report outlines which economic evaluation methods are relevant for assessing specific benefits, and the general strengths and challenges of each. These include market prices, net factor income, avoided damage cost, and value transfer.
For example, in theory, value transfer can be used to estimate benefits for any nature-based solution. It uses existing primary valuation studies to predict information for other locations, which generally costs less than other methods, is quicker, and can be applied at scales that aren’t feasible for primary valuation methods. But, this approach requires accurate and sufficient primary valuations from which to transfer value. And it needs careful application since the estimated values can vary in accuracy and result in transfer errors.
To assess projects beyond their economic value, you’ll need to use benefit-relevant indicators. These indicators measure the advantages of risk-reduction and other benefits for society and environmental sustainability. For example, providing meaningful livelihoods to local communities, boosting the number of visitors, and increasing life expectancy.
Using your evaluation to inform design and implementation
Once completed, your assessment of nature-based solutions should be integrated across the full project lifecycle, and used to inform project identification, design, implementation, and impact evaluation.By doing so, you can raise awareness, engage stakeholders, and accurately monitor the long-term benefits of your investment.
And you’ll be able to identify the methodology required to create much more cohesive projects. Those that will result in more meaningful outcomes – whether you use nature-based solutions or more traditional, grey infrastructure.
Real-world example: evaluating the feasibility of nature-based solutions in the Republic of Mozambique
Following major cyclones in 2019, Royal HaskoningDHV supported a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the feasibility of nature-based solutions for coastal protection in Beira, the Republic of Mozambique.The cost-benefit analysis assessed three different designs to cover four coastal sections in Beira. Each coastal section was assessed against each potential design to decide which would be the most effective solution for that individual location.
The analysis uncovered nature-based benefits such as risk reduction and ecosystem services, combined with the avoidance of indirect negative effects like loss of wages and damage to the tourism economy.
Overall, the cost-benefit analysis in this project played a crucial role in informing the decision-making process for coastal resilience investments. It ensured economic returns and guided the selection of design alternatives based on their viability and benefits.
Embracing nature-based solutions for a resilient future
As a society, it’s essential that we incorporate nature-based solutions into climate resilience strategies. They have a crucial role to play in addressing climate crises. And by accurately evaluating their benefits and costs, we can fully unlock the advantages these solutions promise and promote more sustainable development. But, we must also remember to assess traditional methods in the same way we do nature-based solutions, measuring their potential long-term benefits and considering their impacts over a large area, to ensure consistency and accuracy.At Royal HaskoningDHV, we use our experience and expertise to compare and understand the benefits and costs of various traditional and nature-based approaches to complex, global challenges – so our clients can always pursue what’s in their best interests. If you’d like to discuss your options, or learn more about how nature-based solutions can help you, get in touch.
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