The report – and a series of accompanying case studies – offers practical and proven approaches for environmental management and eco-engineering in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, that can, in large, be tailored for different situations. This is important if the benefits of what this report highlights are to become shared and used more extensively.

Climate change is a global phenomenon that poses risks to sectors across society and the economy. Nature-based approaches can offer sustainable solutions to cope with climate change mitigation and adaptation challenges. The brochure "Nature-based approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation", developed by Ecologic Institute on behalf of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), introduces the opportunities, challenges, and success factors of nature-based solutions and presents good practice examples.

Nature-based solutions simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits by bringing more nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes. The Horizon 2020 Expert Group on ‘Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities’, chaired by Dr. Wilhelm Krull, Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, was established under the 2014 Work Programme for the Societal Challenge “Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials”. Dr.

Nature ‐ Based Solutions (NBS) are solutions to societal challenges that are inspired and supported by nature. The European Commission requested the EKLIPSE project to help building up an evidence and knowledge base on the benefits and challenges of applying NBS.

Climate change impacts are a key challenge for sustainable urban development. To address this challenge, ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA), i.e., the use of ecosystem services and biodiversity to help people adapt to climate change, is increasingly being considered as an alternative or complement to traditional, engineering-based approaches (increasingly also known as nature-based solutions).

Blue and Green Infrastructures (B&GI) are nature-based solutions considered as particularly efficient to reduce the potential impact of new and existing developments with respect to stormwater issues. In order to assess their performance at some large scales compatible with urban projects, adapted distributed rainfall-runoff models are required. The latest advancements of the Multi-Hydro platform have made possible the representation of such B&GI.

Spatial planning has to deal with trade-offs between various stakeholders’ wishes and needs as part of planning and management of landscapes, natural resources and/or biodiversity. To make ecosystem services (ES) trade-off research more relevant for spatial planning, we propose an analytical framework, which puts stakeholders, their land-use/management choices, their impact on ES and responses at the centre. Based on 24 cases from around the world, we used this framing to analyse the appearance and diversity of real-world ES trade-offs.

We considered the limnological literature for an overview of biomanipulation methods that were implemented to avoid or reduce cyanobacterial bloom development in ponds and lakes. For this purpose, we reviewed 48 publications representing 34 whole-lake and large-scale case studies of different biomanipulation approaches clearly mentioning the extent of a cyanobacteria bloom problem and the cyanobacteria taxa involved.

Wetlands are often considered as nature-based solutions that can provide a multitude of services of great social, economic and environmental value to humankind. Changes in land-use, water-use and climate can all impact wetland functions and services. These changes occur at scales extending well beyond the local scale of an individual wetland. However, in practical applications, engineering and management decisions usually focus on individual wetland projects and local site conditions.

Land use is a main driver for changes in supply and demand of regulating ecosystem services (ES). Most current ES inventories are static and do not address dynamics of ES supply resulting from historic and future land use change. This paper analyzes the role of land use change for the supply of two regulating services, flood regulation and climate regulation, in the European Union (EU) for the period between 1900 and 2000 as well as for four plausible scenarios of future land use change up to 2040.