Promoting Nature-based Solutions

For both disaster mitigation and climate adaptation, experts are increasingly calling for greater use of nature-based solutions since these can be cost-effective, robust, and offer many co-benefits.  Healthy ecosystems provide many benefits including critical services like reducing impacts from storms and hurricanes, slowing sea-level rise impacts, providing habitat, sequestering carbon, and filtering runoff. Additionally, protecting and restoring habitats can help sustain local economies by providing opportunities for recreation and tourism.  In an effort to help prevent, halt, and reverse the degradation of ecosystems around the world, the United Nations has declared 2021-2030 the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. 

The Policy Incubator is currently focused on models for insurance to help create expanded financial incentives for provisioning ecosystems that reduce risks and, more broadly, policies for scaling up ecosystem restoration, particularly in coastal areas, which are at greatest threat of rising sea levels.