Nature-Based Solutions - working with natural processes and coastal conservation

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are powerful tools that can help with both biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation simultaneously. NbS involve the protection, sustainable management, and restoration of natural ecosystems, which are home to a wide variety of species (Cohen-Shacham et al., 2016). By conserving, enhancing and restoring natural habitats, NbS help maintain and increase biodiversity. They offer an alternative to the traditional infrastructure and mitigation approach.

The capacity to leverage multi-benefit solutions can be particularly strategic, since ports keep a close interrelationship with their environments and stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to combine port development with acceptance and support, often known as a license to operate. While helping to offset negative social and environmental impacts, NBS can also be leveraged to create social, environmental and economic benefits and strengthen a port’s license to operate. With NBS helping to meet multiple objectives, ports can use them as a multifaceted tool. By working with nature, ports can contribute to the sustainable development goals, as well as climate and sustainability agendas, while tackling port-specific challenges such as mitigating hazards and dredging needs.

Broadly, NBS in ports are split into categories of: Working with Coastal Systems, Wave and Coastal Dynamics Attenuation, Beneficial Reuse of Dredged Sediment, Enhanced Hard Structures (World Bank, 2025).

The IUCN classified NBS applications into three types: (1) better using the existing natural ecosystems or the protected ecosystems; (2) sustainably managing or restoring the ecosystems, and; (3) building new ecosystems (Cohen-Shacham et al., 2016)

In ports, NBS include actions like restoring wetlands or mangroves, optimizing port and channel layouts that leverage natural flows, and enhancing ecosystems to improve coastal resilience, climate mitigation and port efficiency but also for delivery of multiple benefits and environmental outcomes.

Broadly, NBS in ports can be split into categories (World Bank, 2025), such as:

• Working with Coastal Systems- Siting of port and channels to minimize dredging, or creating natural barrier such as sand breakwaters, dune systems, or more resilience intertidal wetlands.
• Wave and Coastal Dynamics Attenuation - Leveraging natural elements for wave attenuation, which reduces wave energy, traps sediments and minimizes sedimentation in ports, reduces storm impact, promotes biodiversity and improves water quality. Includes, ecological breakwaters, intertidal zones of mangroves or salt marshes, offshore reefs, dune systems.
• Beneficial Reuse of Dredged Sediment: utilizing dredged material to create natural barrier systems, or enhance coastal conservation, such as nourishment of beach systems to coastal wetland creation/enhancement.
• Enhanced Hard Structures. Hard infrastructure equipped with nature-based features can help create habitats while contributing to increased performance of certain infrastructure elements. Ecologically enhanced design features are integrated into existing infrastructures, to mimic natural habitats of various scales. Some of these features may include varying textures, added complexity, and substrate types that attract and provide refuge for marine organisms. Examples include adding complexity for life on hard quay wall structures or incorporating module intertidal pools into breakwaters, hanging and floating structures, habitat creation units. The living seawall concept provides three-dimensional texture, shape and form to flat seawalls and other ocean-facing structures, which otherwise lack complexity for marine habitat.

The guiding principle of NBS is to work with nature, not against it. This requires a system understanding and the inclusion of natural processes at the core of the solutions to different problems. Also, interaction with relevant stakeholders, including local communities, is key for a successful implementation. Further, NBS are context-specific, multi-functional, innovative, and dynamic, and are based on a system perspective (World Bank, 2025).

Working with Nature is about more than avoiding or mitigating the environmental impacts of a pre-defined design. Rather, it sets out to identify ways of achieving the project objectives by working with natural processes to deliver environmental protection, restoration or enhancement outcomes.

Working with Nature is an integrated process which involves working to identify and exploit win-win solutions which respect nature and are acceptable to both project proponents and environmental stakeholders. It is a philosophy which needs to be applied early in a project when flexibility is still possible. By adopting a determined and proactive approach from conception through to project completion, opportunities can be maximized and - importantly - frustrations, delays and associated extra costs can be reduced (PIANC, 2011).

Benefits of Implementing NBS include:

• Climate resilience: Reduces vulnerability to sea-level rise, storm surges, and extreme weather events.
• Operational efficiency: Can lower maintenance costs compared to traditional hard infrastructure.
• Environmental and social co-benefits: Supports biodiversity, improves water quality, and strengthens community relations.
• Alignment with global frameworks: Supports Sustainable Development Goals and climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.

The availability of technical knowledge and policy directives on NBS is limited for most ports, as is their financial capacity.

Direct financial benefits of NBS related to port operations may materialise through changes in operating costs. Depending on the scope of the business case, financial benefits may also result from giving value to otherwise waste materials and activities, such as dredged sediments, and their costly disposal. There is evidence that the implementation of NBS saves costs or even generates benefits exceeding financial investment costs with a long-term view for risk mitigation or ecosystem resilience, its benefits are still difficult to measure quantitatively (European Commission, 2015).

Economic benefits of NBS are usually based on concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital, aimed at regulating climate and disaster risks.

Two types of benefits can be distinguished (van Zanten et al., 2023):

1. Risk reduction benefits: Including flood, erosion, heat, drought, water supply and regulation, and landslide risk.
2. Other societal benefits: These vary depending on the specific NBS intervention and may include the provisioning of food, raw materials, and drinking water, as well as the enhancement of biodiversity, tourism and recreation, and global climate regulation (including carbon sequestration).

Not all benefits directly profit the port itself but redound to the wider environment and society. However, these “societal benefits” can still improve the business case for NBS by attracting potential investors, stakeholders, governments, and local communities.