AUTHORS: Laure-Lou Tremblay and Evelyn Underwood

The EU is increasingly threatened by climate risks, and the investments needed for adaptation are growing. As the EU organises its policy response, nature-based solutions (NbS) emerge as key tools for increasing the Union’s resilience, answering multiple challenges at the same time. The new NetworkNature briefing details the key steps needed for regional and national policymakers to deploy NbS, and highlights existing tools to support them.

The publication of the 2024 EU Climate Risk Assessment, a first-of-its-kind report, revealed to EU citizens and policymakers that the EU’s vital systems are currently not prepared to meet the 36 assessed climate risks. Without appropriate and urgent responses, these risks will likely compromise the EU’s food and water security, ecosystem services provision, energy security, financial stability, and the health of the general population.

Taking stock of these gaps in resilience policy and planning, the EU will soon release a new integrated framework for European climate resilience and risk management. The framework will be composed of both legislative and non-legislative measures to help Member States face the growing impacts of climate change. Many national climate adaptation strategies, as required by the 2021 Climate Adaptation Strategy and the EU Climate Law, already prioritise nature-based solutions in broad terms. The proposed new legal framework will establish the principle of climate resilience by design, taking into account a common climate scenario and risk assessments to be mainstreamed across all policies, institutions, and sectors, as announced by the European Union Preparedness Strategy. It will provide decision-support tools based on Copernicus data to help stakeholders identify climate impacts in their regions or sectors and improve access to support mechanisms for local authorities. 

The Commission’s recent assessment of EU and Member States adaptation investment needs identified the largest investment need categories as infrastructure vulnerability. This is a critical concern across Europe due to slow-onset events like sea-level rise, and extreme weather such as storms and heatwaves, flooding, and droughts. The second highest investment category is ecosystem restoration, caused by widespread threats to ecosystems and species diversity, particularly due to extreme weather events, habitat degradation, and changing climatic conditions. Infrastructure protection and ecosystem restoration are areas that can be addressed effectively by nature-based solutions.

There is a very strong evidence base supporting the idea that Nature-based Solutions at the landscape scale are powerful tools to build climate resilience. The upcoming policy package is an opportunity to embed NbS as a key tool for the EU’s preparedness even more strongly. The public consultation on the proposal demonstrated support for the policy requiring nature-based solutions as the default first line of defence.

Preparedness to climate risks is inherently complex, because risks are shared across sectors and require coordinated action. Regional authorities urgently need greater policy coherence, capacity building and inclusive governance mechanisms that enable practitioners and other stakeholders to regionally implement policy frameworks. The NetworkNature European project details pathways for how this could be done, and showcases tools, developed by EU-funded projects, to guide regional policy-makers.

The latest NetworkNature policy briefing highlights that:

• Governance and capacity for designing and financing climate adaptation are critical enablers: regions need support, champions, cross-ministerial coordination, and practical tools.
• Adequate, accessible, and sufficient private and public funding is crucial to achieving landscape-scale NbS that address climate adaptation and resilience.
• Monitoring, tracking and accountability are vital but challenging, as many NbS projects lack sustained, high-quality data, and short-term funding limits long-term monitoring. EU co-funded NbS projects should be required to include baseline assessments and long-term monitoring plans of at least ten years.

Read the full policy briefing on the NetworkNature website.

The NetworkNature project will organise a Science Policy Day and the annual event during the NbS International Congress in Paris from 2 to 6 November 2026. More information and registration here.

Blog photo by Darko Pribeg on Unsplash