Greening Water Risks

Confronted with an increase in floods, droughts and other natural hazards, cities and regions are alert to find climate proof solutions that overcome the limitations of traditional grey infrastructure.
Nature-based solutions are proposed as a valid way to address risk and adapt to climate change while increasing resilience through the multiple benefits they generate. However, in spite of the widespread academic and political support for NBS, their implementation is lacking. As key barriers to implementation there are institutional and regulatory barriers, an absence of clear evaluation of NBS performance, funding/financing barriers and knowledge and acceptance barriers.
This Open Access book provides a hands-on guide to overcome these barriers, through the stepwise creation of nature-assurance schemes that operationalize the insurance value of ecosystems. At the basis thereof is an integrated biophysical, economic and social assessment which is integrated with implementation considerations through the generation of business models and blended funding and financing schemes.
This book will be of interest to practitioners and researchers who want to better understand how to operationalize the insurance value of ecosystems. The book provides 9 DEMO examples on the application of this method across different scales: urban, medium and large catchments and target both floods and droughts.

Dr Elena López Gunn is the Founder and Director of ICATALIST, a Spanish start up specialized in climate change adaptation and sustainability. She is also Lead Author for WGII of the IPCC and Member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on climate change. In the past she worked at the London School of Economics as an Alcoa Research Fellow, focusing on water governance and collective action to achieve sustainable water management. She has worked at the Water Observatory of the Botin foundation, a Think tank undertaking targeted research to provide new evidence on key policy questions both in Spain and globally.  Elena has collaborated with several organizations including UNESCO, FAO, UNDP, EU DG RTD, universities and river basin agencies, municipalities and regional governments, as well as the private sector like Repsol, and NGOs like Transparency International, undertaking research and knowledge transfer on robust water governance and climate change adaptation. 

She was the scientific coordinator of the H2020 NAIAD project on the Natural Insurance Value: assessment and demonstration (www.naiad2020.eu). Her current interests are focused on how to have a deeper understanding on the role nature can play to reduce or manage risks and generate co-benefits at different scales. She is also focused and committed to structuring real projects on the ground with end users to accelerate the uptake of more sustainable solutions to current socio-ecological challenges.

Peter van der Keur has a background in soil physical and vegetation hydrological processes and modelling. He has since 2001 been employed by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and initially worked on research related to water and solute transport, including uncertainty assessments, from the soil surface to the groundwater domain. Later focus has shifted towards water resources management including hydrological impact studies on climate changeadaptation and disaster risk reduction mainly from a groundwater perspective and participated in various European, Nordic and national funded projects. In the H2020 NAIAD project he was co-leading  the part on demonstrating nature-based climate adaptation solutions in contrasting European case studies. Recently he coordinated the H2020 TACTIC (GeoERA) project on climate change impact on groundwater resources and is currently in the Horizon Europe GSEU project coordinating the part on appraisal, protection and sustainable use of Europe’s groundwater resources. He is a member of the Water Resources Expert Group (WREG) and Urban Geology Expert Group (UGEG), both within the EuroGeoSurveys (EGS).

Nora Van Cauwenbergh is an expert in water and sustainable development with over 15 years of experience in academia and the private sector. She is passionate about contributing to a green and inclusive society through co-design of innovative natural resources management considering different value systems. She has extensive experience with participatory design and use of software tools and protocols for stakeholder negotiation in water management. Her research and capacity building expertise spans across management and governance of water scarcity, integrated water resources management, planning and conflict management, and integration of nature-based solutions in basin and city planning around the globe. In H2020 NAIAD project, she was co-leading the integration of methods and tools with stakeholder perspectives and business models. As social entrepreneur in the private sector, she grounds her work on co-design and implementation of green solutions in buildings and cities. She has academic positions at IHE Delft in the Netherlands and at VUB/KULeuven (IUPWARE) in Belgium, where she coordinates and teaches various water management and planning topics and supervises MSc and PhD candidates. 

Philippe LE COENTwas originally trained as an agronomist and worked for 10 years as an expert in crop production, including 6 years at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). He then started research activities in environmental economics since 2013. His early research work focused on the design and evaluation of innovative policy instruments to promote pro-environmental behavior by economic agents. Since 2018, he has been a  researcher at the French geological Survey (BRGM) and in the G-Eau lab in Montpellier, France. He now develops research on the economic valuation of Nature based Solutions and their contribution to water security particularly in urban contexts. He notably led the economic valuation component of the H2020 NAIAD project implemented in 6 European countries. He also conducts research on water resource economics and decision-making methods under high uncertainty in the context of climate change. He mainly mobilizes empirical methods such as econometric analysis, quantitative surveys, choice experiments and experimental economics in the laboratory and in the field. 

Raffaele Giordano is an expert in participatory modelling approaches for the sustainable management of water resources, with over 20 years of experience in research organizations. He is passionate about bringing a variety of stakeholders’ knowledge and perceptions into the modelling process. He has spent the last decade addressing the key challenges of knowledge co-production and of the actual usability of environmental models. Bridging the gaps between scientific knowledge and the decision-making process is at the core of his research activities. In the H2020 NAIAD project, he was leading the activities related to the inclusion of social issues in the co-design of NBS for water-related risks. Recently he started coordinating the BIOTRAILS project, an EU Horizon Europe-funded project. He is a researcher at the Italian National ResearchCouncil – Water Research Institute, where he coordinates the group dedicated to the development of System Dynamic Models for water resource management.