Nature-Based Solutions: Working With Nature to Solve Human Challenges

For most of the industrial era, solving human problems has meant building over nature: concrete seawalls to hold back floods, chemical inputs to force food from tired soil, engineered systems to move and clean water. Nature-based solutions invert that logic. Instead of working against natural systems, they put functioning ecosystems, wetlands, forests, rivers, reefs, and urban green space, to work as infrastructure that tackles the very same challenges, often more cheaply and with benefits that engineered alternatives cannot match.

The UN Environment Programme defines nature-based solutions as actions that protect, restore, or sustainably manage ecosystems to address environmental and societal challenges, while delivering benefits for people and biodiversity. The striking part is their potential. Working with nature could reduce emissions by up to 11.7 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent a year by 2030, more than 40% of what is needed to keep warming in check, and nature-based solutions consistently rank among the most cost-effective climate actions available. Yet they attract only a small fraction of the finance they need. This guide explains what they are, where they make a difference, what they look like in practice, and why such an effective tool remains so underused.

What Nature-Based Solutions Actually Are

The essence of a nature-based solution is captured in a single phrase: working with natural processes rather than against them. The contrast with conventional grey infrastructure is the clearest way to understand it. A concrete basin can hold floodwater, but a restored wetland holds floodwater while also filtering pollution, storing carbon, supporting wildlife, and providing recreation. A seawall can blunt a storm surge, but a healthy mangrove forest blunts the surge while nursing fisheries, sequestering carbon, and sustaining coastal livelihoods. The engineered option delivers one function; the natural one delivers several.

Crucially, this is not wishful thinking. A review of 109 nature-based interventions aimed at climate change adaptation found that those which successfully supported adaptation were also associated with a 67% average increase in benefits for ecosystem health. In other words, well-designed nature-based solutions tend to solve the human problem and improve the ecosystem at the same time, which is precisely the trade-off that grey infrastructure usually forces and that nature-based approaches avoid.

Where They Make a Difference

Nature-based solutions apply across four broad domains, each addressing a pressing human challenge.

Climate resilience is the most prominent. Nature-based solutions reduce climate risks, help communities adapt to extreme weather, and support long-term resilience, while also cutting emissions on the scale noted above. Because they are among the most cost-effective mitigation options and simultaneously build adaptive capacity, they do double duty in a way few other climate tools can.

Water and food security is the second. Restoring watersheds and wetlands improves water availability, sustainable land management supports food production, and functioning floodplains and forests reduce both flood and drought risk, addressing the resource pressures that climate change is intensifying.

Ecosystem protection is the third, restoring degraded ecosystems, protecting biodiversity, and strengthening the overall integrity of natural systems. This matters far beyond conservation, because more than half of global GDP depends moderately or highly on nature, making ecosystem health an economic foundation rather than an optional extra.

Healthy and resilient communities is the fourth. Nature-based solutions improve air and water quality, support public health, create greener urban spaces, and strengthen the resilience of the communities that depend on them, delivering benefits that people feel directly in daily life.

Examples in Practice

The concept becomes concrete in six widely used approaches, each solving a specific challenge while regenerating nature.

Restore wetlands turns degraded marshes back into natural sponges that store water, reduce flood risk, and support rich biodiversity, while also locking away carbon.

Restore forests and landscapes protects watersheds, reduces soil erosion, and strengthens climate resilience, with reforestation and landscape restoration delivering carbon capture as a bonus.

Give rivers room to flow works with natural river systems and floodplains rather than confining them, using that space to improve flood protection and water security, an approach that has proven more resilient than ever-higher embankments.

Sustainable agroforestry integrates trees with crops and livestock to support food security and ecosystem health at once, improving soil, diversifying farmer incomes, and building resilience into agriculture.

Urban green and blue spaces use parks, street trees, wetlands, and waterways to improve urban climate regulation and human wellbeing, cooling cities, managing stormwater, cleaning air, and supporting mental and physical health.

Restore coastal ecosystems rebuilds mangroves, reefs, and salt marshes to strengthen natural coastal protection while supporting biodiversity and the local communities whose livelihoods depend on healthy coasts.

The common thread across all six is that each addresses a concrete human challenge while restoring rather than depleting the natural systems involved, the opposite of the usual development trade-off.

The Triple Value of Nature-Based Solutions

What ultimately sets nature-based solutions apart is that they create value across three dimensions simultaneously, and this triple return is the heart of their case.

The environmental gains are the most obvious: carbon stored, biodiversity protected, water and air cleaned, and degraded land restored. The social wellbeing benefits are just as real, from improved public health and disaster resilience to greener neighbourhoods and new livelihoods, with Indigenous peoples and local communities, often the most effective custodians of land, among the chief beneficiaries. And the economic resilience they provide is frequently underestimated: nature-based solutions are often cheaper than grey infrastructure over their full life cycle, they avoid the enormous costs of climate disasters, and they generate durable jobs and income streams. Environmental, social, and economic value are not traded off against one another here; they are produced together.

Why Nature-Based Solutions Remain Underused

Given all this, the obvious question is why such an effective, multi-benefit tool sits on the margins of global action. The answer is a striking mismatch between value and finance. Only around $133 to $154 billion flows into nature-based solutions each year, of which roughly 86% comes from public sources and just 14% from private finance. UNEP estimates that this needs to more than double to about $384 billion a year to meet climate, biodiversity, and land goals, while restoration finance alone must quadruple from $64 billion in 2022 to nearly $296 billion by 2030.

The deeper imbalance is more revealing still. UNEP's State of Finance for Nature 2026, pointedly subtitled "Nature in the Red," found that for every dollar the world invests in protecting or restoring nature, roughly thirty dollars are spent on activities that degrade it. The problem is therefore not that nature-based solutions do not work or cost too much; it is that the financial system is still overwhelmingly wired to fund the destruction of nature rather than its repair. The reasons are structural: the benefits of nature are diffuse, long-term, and hard to price and capture, while grey infrastructure enjoys established financing channels and clear ownership. The fixes are increasingly clear too, from redirecting environmentally harmful subsidies to deploying blended finance, public-private partnerships, and development-bank instruments, and above all from treating nature as the infrastructure it actually is.

The Bottom Line

Nature-based solutions represent a fundamental shift in how humanity approaches its hardest challenges: from fighting nature to enlisting it. By protecting, restoring, and sustainably managing ecosystems, they address climate change, water and food security, and community health while regenerating the natural systems those challenges stem from, and they do so cost-effectively, delivering environmental, social, and economic value at the same time.

The barrier is not evidence or effectiveness; it is finance and mindset. Shifting even a fraction of the money currently spent degrading nature toward restoring it would unlock one of the most powerful and underused tools available for building a livable future. Working with nature, the evidence increasingly shows, is not the soft or sentimental option. It is one of the smartest investments available.

Sources

The UN Environment Programme (State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red, the Restoration Finance Report, and UNEP's work on nature-based solutions), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (the IUCN definition and Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions), the UNEP Finance Initiative (Introduction to Nature-based Solutions), the European Investment Bank and European Commission (investing in nature-based solutions), the World Economic Forum and PwC (nature-dependency of global GDP), and peer-reviewed research on the biodiversity and adaptation outcomes of nature-based solutions.

This article is intended for general professional information and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice.