Presidential Roundtable summary: how can governments incorporate nature-based solutions in their infrastructure systems?

Governments globally are facing challenges in decarbonising their economies and increasing resilience to the impacts of climate change.

Traditional hard infrastructure solutions are limited in addressing this effectively, not least as human activity puts the world’s ecosystems under immense pressure.

Habitat loss is happening at an unprecedented rate, and almost a third of this damage is due to construction.

Nature-based solutions, if implemented well, have the potential to provide policymakers with solutions that achieve better outcomes for people and the planet.

However, while nature-based solutions have the potential to offer long-term benefits for people, the environment, and the economy, a range of barriers have limited their scale.

The ICE convened a roundtable of experts, chaired by ICE President Anusha Shah, to discuss how governments can incorporate nature-based solutions into their infrastructure systems.

We asked attendees:

• What are the policy challenges to incorporating no-build solutions in the planning and delivery of infrastructure systems?
• How can cost-benefit analyses (e.g. Green Book) and other government mechanisms encourage the use of nature-based solutions?
• What steps are needed to raise the profile of 'do-nothing', low-build or nature-based solutions in infrastructure systems among policy and decision makers?