The European Dredging Association (EuDA) participated in a Horizon 2020 project sponsored by the European Union. The project named ThinkNature had as objective to promote the application of nature-based solutions (NBS). NBS have obvious advantages but have not been embraced at wider scale. In this article, the authors reflect as to why NBS are not mainstream solutions, why it is necessary to promote the concept and whether there are barriers that hinder wide-scale application. In this article the authors describe how relevant the topic is to the dredging community.