Abstract

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are “actions to protect, sustainably manage, or restore natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges, simultaneously providing benefits for people and the environment.”

They present opportunities to tackle both the climate and biodiversity crises simultaneously by supporting carbon sequestration by ecosystems, enhancing community resilience to climate hazards, and providing high-quality habitats for diverse species. However, uncertainty around the performance and reliability of NBS continues to be raised by engineers, local decision-makers, grant-makers, and the insurance industry as an obstacle for widespread implementation of NBS at scale. This uncertainty indicates the need for comprehensive and accessible data on NBS projects and outcomes that could be used to develop engineering standards, assess projects’ cost-benefit ratio, and incorporate NBS into insurance premium pricing.

A first step in addressing this challenge is understanding where different types of NBS projects have been implemented, what their intended outcomes were, how those projects have performed, and what factors have influenced their performance. This report evaluates the NBS data currently available through publicly available databases relative to the information needs described above. In total, 27 databases with publicly available, structured information on NBS research studies (6 databases) or individual projects (21 databases) were assessed for their utility as well as geographic and topical coverage.

The project objectives were to achieve the following:

• Understand the information currently available on NBS performance through research literature and project-level reporting in existing databases
• Evaluate the type and utility of information contained in each identified database
• Assess the coverage of NBS information available in the identified databases in terms of geography and NBS types
• Identify gaps in NBS database coverage and utility

Affiliated Organizations

Nicholas School for the Environment at Duke University

The Nicholas School of the Environment is one of the world’s premier graduate and professional schools for the interdisciplinary study of the environment and the development of pathways for a sustainable future.

Located in the heart of Duke University’s campus, the school functions as an intellectual hub, drawing input from all disciplines at Duke – law, business, policy, medicine, science, social science, engineering
and divinity – and extending that expertise to citizens, governments,
industry and conservation organizations worldwide.

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Duke University

Home of the Blue Devils, Duke University has about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students and a world-class faculty helping to expand the frontiers of knowledge. The university has a strong commitment to applying knowledge in service to society, both near its North Carolina campus and around the world.

Sustainable Duke - Duke University seeks to attain and maintain a place of leadership in all that we do. This includes leadership in environmental stewardship and sustainability on campus, in our medical institutions, and in the larger community of which we are a part.

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