One of the NATMed project’s key goals is to set up a series of Full Water Cycle Nature-based Solutions (FWC-NbS) to improve water management and address challenges like water scarcity, climate change, and soil degradation. To ensure these solutions are effective and sustainable, we are applying the IUCN Global Standard for NbS in all five case studies. This standard provides a holistic framework to evaluate the impact of NbS and refine its implementation.
The IUCN Global Standard for NbS is a comprehensive tool for guiding the design, implementation, and evaluation of NbS projects. It ensures that interventions effectively address identified challenges while benefiting nature and people. The standard helps extract best practices, identify areas for improvement, and generate recommendations that can be shared and scaled up.
The Standard is built on 8 key criteria, ensuring NbS are:
- Effective in addressing societal challenges.
- Designed at the appropriate scale.
- Supportive of biodiversity and ecosystem integrity.
- Economically viable.
- Governed inclusively, transparently, and empowering all stakeholders.
- Balancing trade-offs equitably while achieving the primary goal.
- Adaptively managed based on evidence.
- Sustainable and mainstreamed within appropriate contexts.
Our partner NBSClimate has provided training and support for each case study to conduct an initial self-assessment based on the Standard during the design phase. So far, the results have been beneficial and have provided great insights to guide and improve our work.
A second round of evaluations will be conducted before the project ends and will be included in a comprehensive FWC NbS Catalogue.
