Valuing Inclusion and Diversity, Embracing Uncertainty: Ways Forward for Nature-based Solutions

There is a growing consensus that working with nature can help to address the pressing interlinked climate and biodiversity challenges, whilst ensuring and enhancing human well-being. Though being driven primarily by climate change mitigation and increasingly adaptation, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are now also widely endorsed as cost-effective means for protecting biodiversity and for promoting a thriving society. Despite their great promises, the implementation and mainstreaming of NbS face several entrenched challenges, including unequal powers in shaping discourses and practices, persistent silos in knowledge and decision-making, as well as considerable uncertainties in terms of the performance and effects of NbS. To promote their wider uptake and unleash their full potentials require valuing inclusion and diversity that underlie the concept of NbS and embracing uncertainty that is inherent to nature. Whilst NbS are unquestionably an important and powerful ally, they are not a panacea that can tackle the pressing climate, biodiversity and wider sustainability challenges alone. With humanity at a critical juncture, where climate and biodiversity predictions grow more dire, every action that can make a difference need to be taken.

The British Academy