Building with nature: solutions for adapting to climate change in the City Port areas

Erik van Eekelen. Program Manager at Ecoshape, Lead Environmental Engineer at Van Oord and Editor of the book "Building with Nature: Creating, implementing and upscaling Nature-based Solutions". Adaptation to climate change is the first objective of AIVP's Agenda 2030. It is one of the main concerns of coastal territories and port cities. As such, AIVP shares ideas that can inspire the various stakeholders to increase the resilience of the territories. In this article, Erik van Eekelen, sets out the six Enablers identified by EcoShape to "build with nature" in aquatic landscapes. On the 25th of January, the Climate Adaptation Summit gathered several world leaders into a digital event, to put climate adaptation in the spotlight. Untill now, the Paris Agreement and many other world-wide initiatives on dealing with climate change have focused primarily on mitigation by limiting our greenhouse gas emissions towards zero by 2050. However, at the start of this decade, we can no longer close the eyes to the impacts that climate change is having already and will continue to have, even if we reach the most ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement. Rising sea levels, increased precipitation, droughts and heatwaves will disrupt the current status quo and impact our cities, landscapes, and ports. At the same time, we see a global decline in biodiversity. Ecosystems we depend upon are under an increased amount of stress. The majority of world leaders agree that we should act now: António Guterres (UN secretary-general), Ban Ki-moon (co-chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation), Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and John Kerry (Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States of America) included that in their statements. But what kind of action do we need? At the Climate Adaptation Summit and COP25 summit there was a common understanding that Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are an invaluable part of the solution. But do we know how to realize those on a sufficient scale? And what is possible in the context of ports and cities? Following the Building with Nature (BwN) approach, EcoShape aims to inspire and…