The Effectiveness, Costs and Coastal Protection Benefits of Natural and NatureBased Defences
"There is great interest in the restoration and conservation of coastal habitats for protection from flooding and erosion. This is evidenced by the growing number of analyses and reviews of the effectiveness of habitats as natural defences and increasing funding worldwide for nature-based defences–i.e. restoration projects aimed at coastal protection; yet, there is no synthetic information on what kinds of projects are effective and cost effective for this purpose.
Ecosystem-based adaptation: a win–win formula for sustainability in a warming world?
Many national and international environmental agreements acknowledge that the impoverishment of ecosystems is limiting the world’s capacity to adapt to climate change and that ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) approaches should be harnessed as a priority. EbA has the potential to increase adaptive capacity and social and ecological resilience to climate change in both developed and developing countries.
Nature-based solutions: delivering national-level adaptation and global goals
Many of the world’s vital natural ecosystems, and the communities reliant on them, are vulnerable to climate change. But there is increasing recognition that ecosystems — if sustainably restored and protected — can also form a strong line of defence against the direct impacts of climate change and support human adaptation over the long term. As the evidence base grows, ecosystems are increasingly prominent in climate change policy, especially in developing nations. Yet intentions rarely translate into robust and informed measurable targets, undermining action.
Mangroves : Reducing the Risk of Disaster through Nature-Based Solutions
The coastal mangrove forest is the buffer between land and sea, playing the critical role of protecting the land and coastal communities from storms, wind and erosion. The short documentary takes us to an island in Southern Thailand illustrating how mangroves have depleted greatly in the last 50 years, how people have been affected, and shows what is being done to restore these habitats to secure a more sustainable future.
URBANFLUXES: Heat produced in our cities is affecting human mortality
Cities are much warmer than their surroundings. Urban structures absorb and trap more solar and thermal radiation than soils or vegetation and that causes an increase in the urban temperature. Moreover, many human activities add heat to the urban climate. The heating and the cooling of buildings, the traffic, various industrial activities and our own human metabolism release energy in the form of heat, called anthropogenic heat.
Webinar: The MI SAFE package
MI-SAFE is a package of services designed to help with meeting the requirements of managers and engineers who may be looking to implement nature based flood defence strategies in order to meet the challenge of reducing the cost of flood protection as well as assisting efforts towards a more wide-spread and successful restoration and conservation of coastal ecosystems. MI-SAFE includes a free viewer based on open source standards
Webinar: "Nature- based solutions: Pandora's box or reconciling concept?"
EKLIPSE - BiodivERsA Webinar, 4th of October 2017
"Nature-based Solutions:
Pandora box or reconciling concept?"
More information:
www.eklipse-mechanism.eu
www.biodiversa.org
Restoring Degraded Land To Benefit People and Planet
Nearly half of Earth's forests have been cleared or degraded – but we have the power to change this! WRI's Global Restoration Initiative works with governments and international partners to inspire, enable and mobilize action to restore vitality to degraded landscapes and forests around the globe. Global Restoration Council Co-Chair Wanjira Mathai describes how restoring degraded landscapes can benefit people and planet.
Forest Landscape Restoration in Rwanda
Rwanda recognizes the importance of forest landscapes for its socio-economic transformation goals. The Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy - EDPRS2 and the Vision 2020 provide a roadmap for forest cover increase up to 30% of the total country. To date, Rwanda has about 28.8% forest cover (of which 37 percent are humid natural forests and Savannahs). In 2004, forest cover was 19.6% meaning we have registered a growth of 1% per year for the last decade.
Cache La Poudre River Restoration through Partnerships
This video showcases the work of the City of Fort Collins Natural Areas Department's restoration at McMurry and North Shields Ponds, lowering unnaturally steep riverbanks and removing an abandoned diversion structure which improved the habitat on the Cache la Poudre River. In 2014, the Natural Areas Department received two Blue Grama awards from the Colorado Open Space Alliance for their outstanding conservation work.