Nature-based solutions on display at Stockholm World Water Week

From a polluted Seine River grabbing the spotlight during this year’s Olympic Games to California’s shrinking lakes offending the olfactory senses of its citizens, it seems like this week’s World Water Week couldn’t come soon enough, writes Dimple Roy, Water Management Director of International Institute for Sustainable Development.

Water-related disasters and pollution have affected more people globally than any other natural disaster in the past 40 years. From drought to flooding, extreme weather patterns are being exacerbated by climate change, often with severe risks that impact housing, agriculture, and many other aspects of our lives. 

As the world gathered in Stockholm this week, much of the discussion will focus on how we can address these challenges with nature-based solutions (NbS)—a technical term to describe ways of working with nature to address environmental and societal challenges. 

If you think of a metallic pipe or a concrete wastewater treatment plant, for example, you’re thinking of “grey” infrastructure. NbS, on the other hand, use natural systems such as wetlands or sand dunes to address multiple environmental challenges at once while providing additional benefits to people’s health and wellbeing. 

These natural solutions can be implemented on their own oralongside pre-existing grey infrastructure. They also make goodeconomic sense—nature-based infrastructure can be over 50% more cost-effective than traditional built infrastructure.

In Mossel Bay, South Africa, for example, when local officials were looking at different ways to deal with sewage, it was proven that natural infrastructure alone, or in combination with grey infrastructure, was not only more cost competitive but also outperformed grey alternatives in terms of efficiency. 

Working with nature in the Dutch beach resort town of Petten was a boon for both tourism and protection against coastal flooding and storms. While more expensive at first, a new beach and sand dunes that were created to extend flood protection in the area ultimately increased tourism revenue and provided greater economic returns than their grey infrastructure alternatives.

Nature-based infrastructure is not only cost-effective, but it often provides multiple benefits as opposed to the singular benefits of grey infrastructure. For example, while a wastewater treatment plant’s sole function is to pump out clean water, well-managed wetlands can perform that function while also providing habitats for key flora and fauna, recreational capacity and removal of greenhouse gases.

Take sponge cities. Filling urban areas with natural spaces including lakes and parks doesn’t only enhance the visual landscape and offer mental health benefits for the local community, it also means rainwater is absorbed more easily, preventing flooding.

Natural surfaces are sponge-like in their ability to hold more water than concrete or asphalt, which increases resilience to drought while reducing the impact of floods.

Further afield in Africa, exciting work is getting underway now to remove invasive species and restore natural wetlands that had previously been paved over in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa—the hope is that this work will make the cities more resilient to both floods and droughts, as wetlands prove to be a natural buffer against these phenomena. 

The next step is to get more projects like this up and running, as fast as possible.

In Canada, there are encouraging efforts in the prairie provinces to make natural infrastructure—a type of NbS—a mainstream concept. Research has shown that, in 2022, the natural infrastructure sector directly employed over 33,000 people and contributed over USD 3 billion to the combined GDP of this region.

And so, as experts cluster together this week in Sweden to discuss how to address some of the world’s greatest challenges when it comes to water, let’s remember that while leaders continue to search for innovative solutions, nature may already have many of the answers they need—once we start building with nature, we start creating a better future.

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