Theme headline
This theme focuses on how Nature-based Solutions support biodiversity enhancement and ecosystem restoration while addressing multiple societal challenges that humans are facing and providing multiple environmental, social, and economic benefits.
Aimed at all NN target groups, this theme emphasizes the use of NbS to help bring diverse and resilient nature back to all ecosystems, restore their equilibrium and protect the planet for future generations.
Theme introduction
The theme topic revolves around leveraging NbS to enhance biodiversity and restore ecosystems. It focuses on harnessing the power of nature to tackle societal challenges, while conserving and restoring biodiversity and ensuring ecosystem integrity, increasing the resilience against climate change impacts, and providing environmental, social and economic benefits. Following proper approaches to design, implementation and upscaling, NbS can be cost-efficient and bring about new economic opportunities and green jobs, enhance air quality, support sustainable water management, increase social justice, social cohesion and the population health and well-being, among other benefits.
The theme is aimed at a broad audience, including national and EU-level policymakers, local and subnational governments, public authorities, educators, educational institutions, students, nature-based solution investors, (nature-based) entrepreneurs, natural resource managers, landowners, infrastructure planners and developers and society at large. It's designed to leave no one behind by inclusively engaging all groups of society to raise awareness about NbS and the importance of their implementation and upscaling to achieve environmental, social and economic benefits and addressing global societal challenges to meet society’s needs.
The importance of this theme lies in its focus on NbS as critical, innovative and effective approach for restoring ecosystems and safeguarding biodiversity. NbS support the delivery of goods and services from ecosystems, therefore strongly depend on their health. By highlighting NbS role in addressing various societal challenges, the theme emphasizes the importance of healthy, diverse ecosystems in delivering ecosystem services, building resilience against climate change, supporting economic growth, and ensuring the health and well-being of communities. The theme highlights the interconnection between human well-being, healthy ecosystems and a rich biodiversity, and encourages practices that ensure a sustainable and resilient future for all.
- The Biodiversity Enhancement and Ecosystem Restoration Theme, like all other, will help frame all capacity building activities planned in NetworkNature.
- In particular, various products, resources and capacity building activities will be developed within this theme:
- Guidance booklets for integration of NbS in selected business sectors dedicated to NbS investors and (nature-based) entrepreneurs
- Targeted online training sessions to understand challenges and develop actions for NbS integration into business decision-making processes
- Thematic capacity-building events for NbS Hubs organised for Hubs representing local and subnational governments and public authorities around Europe.
- Map of NbS resources, study guides and lesson plans for educators.
- Game-based platform that will link sciences to decision making and outcomes for policy makers; and learning for students.
- Annual conferences, gathering all NN target groups, and aiming at exploring themes revolving around the concept, policy, and implementation of NbS.
Resources
Nature-based solutions for ecosystem restoration
Understand the key aspects of ecosystem restoration, why it is important, and how it contributes to biodiversity. This report details how to support ecosystem restoration and provides a policy perspective on how ecosystem restoration supports reaching the objectives of international agreements.
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Seizing opportunities for ecosystem restoration to tackle societal challenges
This factsheet explores the potential of ecosystem restoration actions to halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems. Building on the outcomes of the last NetworkNature semester theme on Nature-based solutions for Ecosystem Restoration, the factsheet provides an analysis of several restoration projects carried out in diverse ecosystems, and addressing multiple challenges. It concludes with a list of recommendations, resources and opportunities moving forward to ensure that restoration actions are put in place to successfully deliver on environmental, social and economic benefits.
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Design Briefs: Biodiversity-Positive design in urban areas
This NetworkNature design brief series, the first of its kind, comprises three design briefs on biodiversity-positive design recommendations for urban and peri-urban areas with nature-based solutions. The series, developed with support of IFLA Europe, presents simple design suggestions for renaturing in built environments to restore or provide habitat for nature. It is not meant to replace professional ecological or landscape guidance, but rather to encourage designers to intentionally consider how they can adopt an interdisciplinary approach to make projects more biodiverse. Specifically, it encourages professionals to adapt to and achieve biodiversity positive design in urban areas via nature-based solutions (NbS).
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What are nature-based solutions?
What are nature-based solutions? Learn more in this short video! The video is created by the EU Nature-based Solutions Clustering Task Force 4: NBS Communicators.
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Theme leader
