Nature-Based Solutions on Public Lands Meeting Series

The White House’s adoption of the United Nations Environment Assembly’s 2020 definition of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) states that “these solutions are actions to protect, sustainably manage, or restore natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges, simultaneously providing benefits for people and the environment.” There is a spectrum of approaches that are captured under this definition, ranging from interventions that require lower levels of design or management (e.g., protection, stewardship, rewilding ecosystems) to more intensive interventions (e.g., buffers, green infrastructure, treatment wetlands). The defining element of NbS is that they restore riverscape processes, including but not limited to river flow, carbon and nutrient transport and storage, and plant succession. Under the umbrella of NbS, process-based restoration (PBR) includes approaches that that re-establish physical, chemical, and biological processes that sustain river and floodplain ecosystems, and low-tech process-based restoration (LTPBR) specify process-based approaches that require less resources to implement and ultimately allow the system to do the work.

In response to increasing interest in and support for LTPBR, this meeting series was designed with these kinds of approaches in mind. Many of the topics explored through this series, however, are applicable to a wider range of restoration practices.

To kick off the series, Peter Skidmore with Dipper Consulting, LLC gave a brief presentation to define nature-based solutions for the purpose of these discussions. View the full slide deck from his presentation below.