Nature-based Solutions and the limits of control

The truth is that our environmental systems are immensely complex and took some 3.7 billion years of evolution of life on planet Earth to form. It is quite astonishing that, even in the midst of all the manifestations of the complexity of those systems (weather extremes, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, etc.), we still seem to cling onto our illusion that we can command our environment, the nature that we see as external to us, in such a way that we can direct its future.

Controlling Storm Eowyn?

And it is not as though we have not witnessed unprecedented and unpredictable heat waves, wildfires, and storms across the globe over the past years. Here in Ireland, storm Eowyn of the 24th of January this year has been estimated to be costing the insurance industry over €240 million, the greatest single storm damage insurance claims total in the history of the Irish state.

I am a coastal geomorphologist, so I ask myself: What kind of a ‘nature-based solution’ would protect coastal areas from the coastal erosion and flooding events like this can cause? Well, here’s the thing: damage from coastal erosion and flooding seems to occur only where development has been allowed to infringe on the natural coastal buffer zone [3]. This is not a human-designed ‘solution’ but simply the coast left to its own devices. Wherever the natural coastal zone had been left intact, we may see a re-distribution of sediment. Erosion in one place, deposition in another. That is the coast’s resilient response to the impact of a storm.

Coastal ecosystems have been surviving in this context for millions of years. We benefit from a wide coastal zone [4]. Where there is sufficient sand, beaches respond to storms by adjusting their profile to a flatter one better able to reduce wave energy. In this way they protect whatever lies landward of them from wave impact. In the same way, coastal wetlands reduce wave energy during storms. For this to happen, however, we have to accept that the coast needs space for wide beaches and wetlands to exist.

Less mastery, more complexity

Giving nature space and not interfering in the erosion, transport, and deposition of sediment, is ‘all’ we have to do. What precisely nature does with the space we give it is a function of many complex processes, their timing and their interaction. But if we allow nature to function in the way it does best, without us trying to control it, we will always derive a multitude of benefits from it.