Several years ago, my family took in a young man and his elderly mother after a flood destroyed their home. Eleven inches of rain had fallen in two days on tiny Painesville, Ohio, a community of 20,000 not far from Lake Erie. The Grand River had swollen to nine times its size and spilled into a row of low-income condominiums. Floodwater pushed past first-floor ceilings, in some cases rising to 17 feet. One woman and her children, dressed in pajamas, had to crawl onto their roof to be rescued. Dozens of families, including the mother and son who settled with my family, lost nearly everything.
What struck me most: It all seemed so inevitable.
The homes in this area were built in a floodplain, a swampy gorge that clearly had been carved by water. Catastrophic floods were destined to come again, especially once climate change promised more extreme rain and snow. But roads, buildings and parking lots speed the flow of water and prevent it from draining into the ground. The development also put people in harm’s way. It was just heartbreaking.
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about that flood. We all watched recently as major hurricanes ripped through the U.S. Southeast. While nothing can contain such storms’ brutal power, more thoughtful uses of nature—relocating buildings out of flood zones; restoring coastal mangroves in the tropics; revegetating sand dunes; planting trees on hillsides and in riparian zones; reducing asphalt—has proven effective time and again in limiting the impacts of climate change.
As communities turn to rebuilding and as global policymakers prepare for this month’s United Nations (UN) Biodiversity Conference in Colombia (COP 16) and next month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Azerbaijan (COP 29), it seemed like a good time to reflect on the ways investing more in natural solutions can help us weather our future.
Restoring Ecosystems Builds Climate Resilience
We tend to think of nature and biodiversity as critical to absorbing carbon dioxide and mitigating climate change—and it is. But nature is equally critical to adaptation. It builds resilience to climate shocks. Trees and shrubs stabilize soil and hold water on their leaves. Forests limit water’s spread, instead of letting it soak into the ground and percolate out slowly. We've destroyed far too many of these natural ecosystems, often in the most critical places along rivers, streams, and coastlines. The challenge now is bringing them back.
Nature-based climate solutions, in other words, come in many forms.
Preserving forests in places like the Congo Basin or the Amazon Rainforest, rather than razing old growth for farmland, cools the landscape and slows the rise of greenhouse gas emissions. Adding pocket parks and trees to dense urban “heat islands” reduces temperatures pushed up by buildings and heat-absorbing blacktop. In Medellin, Colombia, for example, simply planting 215 native species along roadways and creating shady bike lanes and walkways reduced the city’s temperature up to 4 degrees Celsius in some areas.
But consider, too, what I witnessed in Haiti. I worked there after Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna displaced more than 14,000 families. Those storms were so destructive in part because the country had lost most of its native forest. Without trees, nothing was there to slow the torrential rains from rushing down barren slopes into dry riverbeds, which rapidly overflowed.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has since helped lower flood risks by employing natural solutions. Workers helped replant millions of trees, mostly fruit trees, which provide income. That discourages Haitians from cutting them down. Shrubs were also planted along riverbanks, reducing erosion.
Abt Global does similar work all around the globe. We’ve helped the U.S. Department of Interior evaluate how 167 green infrastructure projects improved coastal resilience to sea-level rise, storm surge, and wave erosion across a dozen states and the District of Columbia. In the Pacific Northwest, we helped Native American tribes document habitat damage and develop restoration plans.
Our TSPi subsidiary created technology that lets the U.S. Department of Agriculture manage conservation grants for farmers. Work by that same subsidiary now helps the National Marine Fisheries Service conduct Endangered Species Act consultations.
How Can We Pay for Nature-Based Solutions?
Still, the barriers to adopting more natural climate defenses are real.
Before successful restoration can begin, for example, communities need to understand the risks. For that, old models no longer work. The world can no longer predict future storms based solely on the past.
So Abt worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to improve projections by creating the National Flood Risk Characterization Tool (NFRCT). The tool incorporates state-of-the-art climate modeling into maps that let users visualize and rank flood risks. That makes it easier to determine which watersheds to address first—and how.
Another pressing question awaits attendees at COP 16: How do we pay for nature-based solutions? Conservation costs money—sometimes a lot. Governments and organizations need help mobilizing innovative financing for restoration and ecosystem preservation.
Abt is helping craft cutting-edge ideas for this, too.
In Mozambique, USAID, with our help, conducted a sophisticated cost-benefit analysis of mangrove restoration. That analysis highlighted the economic benefits to sustainable, non-extractive industries, which led the U.S. Millenium Challenge Corporation to invest $100 million in mangrove recovery.
Similarly, in Indonesia, Abt and the Green Climate Fund are at work on a groundbreaking project that blends public, private, and philanthropic capital to support marine protection. The premise is deceptively simple: Healthier oceans can help sustainable natural resource industries thrive—through richer, more profitable fisheries, for example. Reinvesting a portion of the economic gains created by, say, expanding marine protected areas can, in turn, generate more income. Over time such investments should produce a self-sustaining fund to continually improve the region’s climate resilience.
Feats of Engineering Aren’t the Only Way to Adapt
The bottom line: There is no more hiding from climate change. Bigger storms, floods, and wildfires are here, as are extreme heat, more severe drought, and all manner of additional risks, from food insecurity to greater exposure to pathogens. Climate impacts increasingly appear all around us. We, of course, need to act faster, but that doesn’t mean we should reflexively turn to feats of engineering as our only means of adapting. We need to train ourselves also to embrace the tools nature has provided.
It’s a lesson Painesville, for one, is heeding.
The young man and his mother who stayed with my family never did move back to their old home. Instead, the city, using state and federal grants, bought up the property and ripped out it and more than 40 other condo units. Officials installed more than 11,000 plants, spruced up wetland areas and built a mile-long walkway. They turned that place into a park and interpretive trail complete with educational signs highlighting stream ecology and floodplain management.
Major flooding will no doubt return to Painesville someday. But rather than pose a direct threat to residents, the 16-acre stretch now home to the Grand River Conservation Area will be there to help slow or curtail rising waters.
And who knows? It may even save lives.
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