Audubon Releases "Nature Works!" Showcasing Nature-Based Solutions

The challenges facing communities and the environment are daunting: severe weather, flooding, and the impacts of climate change have all taken center stage. Today Audubon released a new report highlighting approaches to these issues that are rooted in nature-based solutions: methods of harnessing the power of nature to provide benefits for our communities and the environment. Nature-based solutions utilize ecosystems to protect people, their homes and communities, and promote biodiversity.

Nature-based solutions are a proven investment in protecting communities, with studies showing they can reduce flood risk, improve water quality, and lower long-term costs while providing co-benefits like wildlife habitat and recreation that traditional “gray” infrastructure cannot. For instance, while wetlands can absorb excess water and pollutants, water runs across the top of concrete, carrying pollution directly to rivers and streams. Nature-based solutions are also generally more cost-effective in the long-term than gray infrastructure. Following disaster, a wetland or restored floodplain habitat has fewer maintenance and repair costs than a flooded storm sewer or breached levee.

The Nature Works! report highlights 11 case studies from across North America, where nature-based solutions have been deployed to address a host of environmental issues: habitat restoration, coastal erosion, storm surge, and flood protection are just a few of the challenges that these multipurpose projects seek to remediate. From the Colorado River basin to the southwest coast of Florida, these case studies demonstrate how communities, government, and other stakeholders can come together to create an optimized project: one that maximizes that use of available funding and engineering design to meet multiple objectives with one project or solution.

Audubon’s Mississippi River program staff collaborated with subject matter experts at Jacobs Engineering to identify compelling examples across the continent, where the threats associated with climate change and historical development of resources had rendered human or natural communities vulnerable to harm. The projects feature a host of governmental agencies at all levels, local stakeholders, engineers, municipalities, and non-governmental organizations coming together to mutually create an answer to a problem. These solutions harness natural processes while augmenting infrastructure in a way that achieves benefits for the ecosystem: optimizing investment and the contributions of all partners on a project to achieve as many benefits as possible. Because of the effectiveness of nature-based solutions, Audubon also created policy recommendations to reduce risks to communities and wildlife.

“Nature Works! serves as an introduction and a primer on the many benefits of nature-based solutions for community leaders and local stakeholders who may be facing similar threats. These solutions aren’t just a way to meet multiple benefits, but they are a responsible deployment of funding when resources are tight,” said Julie Hill-Gabriel, Audubon’s Vice President for Habitat Conservation. “When assessing resilience plans along the Florida coast, preparing for floodwaters in the Mississippi Delta, or looking for ways to efficiently invest public resources, this report features examples of optimized solutions and on-the-ground results.”

This report is meant to inspire decision-makers and communities to assess a scope of solutions beyond traditional gray infrastructure, which can solve some challenges but may not approach the problem from a holistic perspective. This approach has gained ground in recent years, as stakeholders and communities have discovered the benefits of meeting multiple challenges with one unified solution. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineering With Nature program has elevated the science and approach, and many states across the country have appointed resilience officers, responsible for identifying where situations ripe for nature-based solutions exist.