Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Resilience

Healthy ecosystems provide important ecosystem services that can contribute to climate change adaptation. For example, healthy mangrove ecosystems provide protection from the impacts of climate change, often for some of the world's most vulnerable people, by absorbing wave energy and storm surges, adapting to rising sea levels, and stabilizing shorelines from erosion. EbA focuses on benefits that humans derive from biodiversity and ecosystem services and how these benefits can be used for managing risk to climate change impacts.

EbA involves the conservation, sustainable management and restoration of ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves or coral reefs to reduce the harmful impacts of climate hazards including shifting patterns or levels of rainfall, changes in maximum and minimum temperatures, stronger storms, and increasingly variable climatic conditions. EbA measures can be implemented on their own or in combination with engineered approaches (such as the construction of water reservoirs or dykes), hybrid measures (such as artificial reefs) and approaches that strengthen the capacities of individuals and institutions to address climate risks (such as the introduction of early warning systems).

IUCN work on EbA

Since 2009, IUCN has promoted the use of EbA as a nature-based solution for addressing the impacts of climate change on people and their environment.

In its work on EbA, IUCN has achieved:

Related Projects
 

• Community-Based Adaptation (CBA Scale+) | IUCN
• ENACT Partnership | IUCN
• Friends of EbA (FEBA) | IUCN
• Global EbA Fund - Support for the Implementation and Upscaling of Ecosystem-based Adaptation | IUCN
• NAbSA (Nature-based Solutions for climate Adaptation: monitoring & impact evaluation) | IUCN
• Regenerative Seascapes for People, Climate and Nature (ReSea) | IUCN
• EbA: Strengthening the evidence and informing policy | IUCN
• Scaling Up Mountain EbA | IUCN

Integrated approaches to adaptation

Nature-based solutions for adaptation hold huge potential to work right now to buffer the impacts of climate hazards for frontline communities.

If adaptation policies and programs are to be effective, they must integrate efforts to sustain and restore ecosystem functions and promote human rights under changing climate conditions. EbA approaches should not stand alone, but be implemented as one component of wider adaptation and development strategies.

IUCN works at this interface in collaboration with the UNFCCC Nairobi Work Programme on Adaptation and Technology Executive Committee, working on adaptation solutions that integrate both nature, technology, and infrastructure development.

IUCN work on Eco-DRR 

A past global project on Eco-DRR that IUCN has worked on is Ecosystems Protecting Infrastructure and Communities (EPIC), which was a collaboration with the Partnership for Disaster Risk Reduction and Adaptation (PEDRR) among other partners. See this publication and this external review for more information. Another project is Resilience through investment in ecosystems: knowledge, innovation and transformation of risk management - RELIEF Kit, funded by the Japan Biodiversity Fund under the Secretariat of Convention on Biological Diversity. See this blog and this story for more information.