Rapid and far-reaching climate action is needed to avoid severe climate change and achieve climate-neutrality before the end of the century. However, current national pledges on mitigation and adaptation are not enough to stay below the Paris Agreement temperature limits and achieve its adaptation goals. To support a greater scale and pace of change, it is becoming necessary to better integrate mitigation measures for emissions reduction and adaptation measures to reduce the impacts of climate change. Nature-based solutions (NBS) are a promising path forward for massive and no-regret solutions. NBS are gaining traction and uptake in both the public and private sector and as such represent a unifying concept to prioritise nature to integrate climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Objective
NATURACT focuses on NBS as an agent for large-scale transformations in land use and land cover in vulnerable landscapes to integrate mitigation measures for emissions reduction and adaptation measures to reduce the impacts of climate change. This is accomplished through interdisciplinary collaboration and the application of an innovative Systems Oriented Design approach that negotiates the complexity of climate change and NBS interventions. NATURACT delivers outputs on NBS to establish their effectiveness for reducing the risk of climate impacts in large-scale landscapes, to quantify regional and global impacts and feedbacks of NBS interventions and policy implications, and to transform attitudes and values towards NBS for adaptation, mitigation and ultimately climate action.
The overall goal is to understand the impact, feedbacks, synergies and trade-offs of NBS to recommend their upscaling for optimising climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
