NbS Digital Dialogues Conference

Last week, several members of the SARCC partnership attended the excellent NbS Digital Dialogues, a digital conference organised by the Nature Based Solutions Initiative based in Oxford. The online event was attended by over 700 people from across the world, more than doubling the original venue’s capacity, preventing unnecessary travel and with only a tenth of the attendees from the UK, a truly global audience was reached. Certainly, a very encouraging positive outcome from the current Covid measures.

Spread across three days, we interacted with a range of expert panellists from each continent, only excluding Antarctica. The topics included NbS as a response to climate change, the social implications of NbS and how disadvantaged communities can be best included to receive the same benefits from NbS investment, NbS financing and governance and finally using NbS for biodiversity gain.

It was inspiring to learn about example projects that have already been carried out and take the major learnings from those, which we will endeavour to implement in our SARCC pilot projects. Marine habitats and coastal cities were also mentioned with attendees raising questions about these topics, showing the need for a project like SARCC.

The need for a greater understanding of the benefits of NbS was mentioned, which aligns well with the NbS visualisation toolkit being developed under SARCC, as well as the SARCC seminars targeting the decision makers and aiming to bring NbS in coastal cities to the forefront of the considered solutions.

We are looking forward to the future events and thank NbS initiative for putting on such an excellent and informative event. For more information, visit their website here: https://www.naturebasedsolutionsoxford.org/nbs-digital-dialogues/