Liberty Island on the Danube River in Hungary before and after a restoration project by WWF and partners, © WWF Hungary
Working with nature will accelerate climate adaptation while also helping to enhance water and food security, reverse nature loss and drive sustainable development
The climate crisis is intensifying at alarming speed, impacting societies, economies and ecosystems across the globe – mostly through water. Every day, the news is full of reports about yet another catastrophic flood, devastating drought, or record-breaking storm. Lives and livelihoods are being lost, communities devastated, and food production, economies and development goals undermined. Global heating is also accelerating the loss of nature – and vice versa. Deeply intertwined, the worsening climate and biodiversity crises threaten everyone’s future.
Despite the worsening impacts and the dire predictions, we are not doing nearly enough to rein in runaway climate change. Needless to say that would result in unimaginable devastation across the globe. We can still avoid that fate. Countries must commit to ambitious plans to deliver a net-zero world by 2050 – and do everything in their power to achieve them.
But we also have to urgently accelerate climate adaptation to enable us to cope with our rapidly changing world, including a massive increase in investment in Nature-based Solutions (NbS).
That’s what WWF’s new report is all about. Watering Resilience: Case studies of Nature-based Solutions for climate adaptation in action demonstrates how NbS in freshwater and coastal ecosystems are central to accelerating climate adaptation. And how they already are boosting adaptation and building resilience in many countries and in many different ways. But the real beauty of the diverse NbS case studies featured in this report is that by enhancing the health of our rivers, lakes and wetlands, they not only help tackle climate change but also deliver a host of co-benefits for people and nature.
They offer real win-win-win solutions.
So why does this report focus on freshwater and coastal ecosystems? Because water is the primary way we will be – and already are being – impacted by climate change. From extreme floods and droughts to decreasing river flows, groundwater levels and rising sea levels, the climate crisis is a water crisis. And healthy freshwater and coastal ecosystems – rivers, lakes, floodplains, wetlands, mangroves and so on – are the best natural defences against these impacts, providing a critical buffer for our communities, companies and cities.
Naturally flowing rivers and connected floodplains slow and spread floodwaters, minimizing flooding downstream. Wetlands absorb water in wetter seasons and release it in drier periods, smoothing out flood peaks and alleviating droughts. Free-flowing rivers from source to sea supply sediment to densely populated and agriculturally rich deltas, preventing them from sinking and shrinking, and keeping them above the rising seas. Thriving mangroves protect coastal communities from storm surges. Urban wetlands cool our cities and make them healthier places to live.
But we have long undervalued these ecosystems. Over the last 50 years, we have lost a third of the world’s wetlands and we continue to lose them faster than forests. In the process, we have sacrificed many of the diverse benefits of healthy freshwater and coastal ecosystems, including their central role in climate adaptation and resilience. The answer is to invest in protecting and restoring them – to turbocharge our use of NbS.
Critically, well-designed NbS can also provide multiple social, economic and environmental benefits on top of accelerating climate adaptation – including enhancing water and food security, mitigating climate change, and reversing nature loss.
The world is in the midst of a nature crisis, which threatens the fabric of life on Earth and our very survival. WWF’s Living Planet Report 2024 found that wildlife species populations have fallen by 73 per cent on average since 1970, with freshwater species populations crashing by an even more catastrophic 85 per cent. By enhancing and sustaining the health of rivers and reefs, marshes and mangroves, streams and seagrass beds, NbS for climate adaptation can simultaneously help to tackle the nature crisis.
This all contrasts with many traditional approaches to tackling these challenges, including engineered, concrete solutions that often provide only a single benefit of physical protection from hazard impacts. As well as the multiple benefits they bring for people and the planet, there’s a strong financial argument for prioritising well-managed NbS. Because of their lower maintenance costs and higher co-benefits, they’re often cheaper to implement and manage than traditional ‘grey’ infrastructure and more resilient, while addressing the same level of risk – so funding them is a smart move.
But there are obstacles to more investment in NbS, including that decision-makers around the world know little about them or aren’t convinced that they work on a large scale, and instead come under pressure to resort to quick, familiar ‘concrete’ solutions that in an era of climate disruption can end up doing more harm than good.
That’s why we’ve put together this report. With a focus on freshwater and coastal ecosystems, it brings together a wide variety of NbS case studies that WWF is developing and implementing around the world. From Brazil to the Baltic, Madagascar to the Mekong, these are real-life examples of initiatives that can accelerate climate adaptation. And while each of them deals with a specific solution in a specific place, the thinking behind them and the techniques they demonstrate are ripe for replication according to local contexts and scaling up. In particular, they highlight the importance of collaboration, of working with communities, partners and governments to deliver resilient solutions.
While these initiatives are all water-related, what’s striking is the sheer range of work that’s taking place, in terms of actions, timescales, magnitudes and locations. Such as the transformative Recharge Pakistan initiative, which is set to drastically strengthen adaptation at the landscape level by restoring wetlands across the Indus River basin to mitigate extreme flooding and replenish aquifers – and benefit millions. Or how restoring mangroves in Madagascar is helping to buffer vulnerable communities against storms. In the Netherlands and Germany, giving more room to rivers reduces flood risk. NbS can help tackle water scarcity in rural grasslands of South Africa as well as acting as a protective natural sponge for the megacity of Hong Kong.
The case studies show that NbS works. They also show that there are a host of innovative approaches that can help to scale these solutions up. But none of this will be possible without a massive influx of money. So at the end of this report, we set out some practical recommendations for decision makers around the world:
300 billion reasons to invest in adaptation
WWF is calling for a step change in ambition: we need to scale up public climate finance for adaptation to US$300 billion per year, and ensure that a significant proportion of the extra funds are earmarked for Nature-based Solutions - given all the co-benefits for people and nature and the reduced risk of maladaptation.
Private sector needs to bank on nature to build resilience
Governments alone cannot accelerate climate adaptation as drastically and rapidly as necessary. The private sector must also throw its financial weight behind climate adaptation. Companies need to scale up collective action to build resilience in river basins, buffering their supply chains and operations, while also supporting more resilient societies. This involves not just investing in projects but advocating for action and policy changes by governments to underpin NbS for climate adaptation.
Power of Principles
Given the scale of the climate crisis, there will need to be some trade-offs in the rush to accelerate climate adaptation. The world must invest in the best mix of solutions, including ‘grey’ and ‘green’ infrastructure. The key to designing adaptation measures and deciding what to invest in comes down to five principles, which will help accelerate action and avoid maladaptation:
- Harness the power of nature first to help people adapt, in order to maximise all the co-benefits that come with Nature-based Solutions;
- Avoid harming nature when planning and implementing adaptation measures;
- Help nature adapt to climate change by enhancing ecosystem connectivity and natural dynamics for strengthened resilience;
- Support the most vulnerable groups first by providing support to communities that are most exposed to climate risks and with the least resources to adapt; and
- Work at system scale, based on science, to build resilience to climate change.
Rising to the Freshwater Challenge
Country-led, the Freshwater Challenge is the largest freshwater restoration and protection initiative in history - with the aim of ensuring that 300,000km of degraded rivers and 350 million hectares of degraded wetlands (including mangroves) are under restoration by 2030, and conserving intact freshwater ecosystems. 47 countries and the EU have already joined the Challenge. It’s time for other countries to join them then to assess and prioritise their rivers and wetlands for protection and restoration - and secure the funding necessary to achieve these national targets.
And at the heart of this will be greater investment in Nature-based Solutions.
We need to prioritise Nature-based Solutions. And we need to start right now. The slower we move and the longer we leave it to invest in nature, the higher the price of climate adaptation will be – and the higher the cost to our communities and societies. Delaying is a lose-lose situation, an entirely false economy.
And Nature-based Solutions work. There is no more need for pilot projects. Nor more proof that they make a difference: they clearly do. As the stories in this report show in so many different ways, nature can be humanity’s strongest ally against the worsening impacts of climate change: embracing its power is the only wise way forward for people and planet.
What we need to do is to trust in the power of nature to buffer us from the intensifying natural disruptions and disasters fuelled by climate change. What we need to do is to focus on redirecting funding into transformational NbS for climate adaptation. This is how we turn the tide. This is how we restore the natural health and dynamism of freshwater and coastal ecosystems - to power us towards a resilient, nature-positive and sustainable future.
