Development Aspects Impressum Editors

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Photo © Andrew Stawarz

Chapter 11:
Natural infrastructure solutions for water security

David Coates

Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Montreal, Canada

Mark Smith

International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Gland, Switzerland

1. What is natural infrastructure and why manage it?

The availability of water at any place and time, and its quality, is determined by the water cycle. The water cycle is a biophysical process that involves precipita- tion falling on a physical landscape in which the functioning of ecosystems in part determines the flow, storage and quality of water. Figure 1 provides a simplified illustration of this cycle.

It is well known that land- and water-use activities impact ecosystems or “the environment” through, for example, the impacts of dams and irrigation on river flows or through land erosion or chemical use leading to water pollution. Capacity
-building to address such impacts remains an important need and this subject cen- tres broadly on the concept of managing “environmental impacts”. This chapter, however, introduces a different and more positive way of looking at ecosystems by considering the opportunities that improved ecosystem management offers to help us achieve our water-management goals. The approach is founded on the fact that ecosystems are not just the victims of water use or diversion for human needs, but are also responsible for making water available in the first place. Proactive ecosystem management, therefore, offers opportunities to manage ecosystems as a “natural infrastructure” alongside, and complementary to, physical or built infra- structure. Natural infrastructure can also offer considerable advantages, including improved sustainability and often cost-effective solutions, and in particular the delivery of co-benefits, in addition to sustaining water for direct human use: for example, the recreational and cultural benefits of an improved landscape, regulat- ing and maintaining soil formation, soil transfer and the health of estuaries, and supporting fisheries.
Climate change provides an additional reason to pay more attention to natural infrastructure solutions. Most commentators recognize that we already have press- ing water challenges, even without factoring in climate change. Climate change will, however, make this situation significantly worse. The main impacts of climate change on people are through changes in the water cycle, which are mostly me- diated through ecosystem changes. Given that climate change is about ecosys- tem change, the logical conclusion is that the adaptation responses required, as a priority but not exclusively, need to consider how to manage ecosystem change. This means that managing natural infrastructure has a key role to play to help us cope with such change (Smith and Barchiesi, 2009). Additionally, climate change

in particular is about the changing frequency and magnitude in extremes of water (droughts and floods) – essentially this is about managing risks under increasing uncertainty. One implication of this is that the original design parameters for much of our existing physical infrastructure are becoming increasingly invalid. Without an effective strategy to respond to changing risks we can reasonably expect more systems to fail, including with catastrophic consequences. Natural infrastructure solutions are, therefore, not just about the design and operation of new water management approaches, but also about retrofitting increased risk reduction into highly managed landscapes and river basins.

Using “natural infrastructure” to manage water is by no means a new idea. Ex- amples of it, although not necessarily using this terminology, span at least several decades (and probably millennia). A number of case studies in this book are either based largely on, or contain elements of, such approaches. What is emerging is an increasing willingness to consider such approaches and increasingly by a more diversified range of stakeholders, such as by agriculture, business, drinking-water supply engineers and urban authorities. What stimulates this interest is the increas- ing evidence base for the approach and, in part, shrinking options for traditional, exclusively hard engineering solutions. There are, however, significant capacity constraints to mainstreaming the approach fully.


Figure 1: A simplified conceptual framework illustrating the role of ecosystems in the water cycle. The ecosystem components of this cycle, including land cover (e.g., forests), wetlands and soils, function as the “natural infrastructure” that supports the water cycle. The figure lists in blue some of the water-related benefits to people (ecosystem services) that this ecosystem functioning provides. In reality, the various services illustrated, and others, are more dispersed, interconnected and impacted by land and water-use activities (not shown in full).





Source: MRC (2003) Mekong River Awareness Kit: interactive self-study CD-Rom. Mekong River Commission. P.O. Box 6101,Unit 18 Ban Sithane Neua, Sikhottabong District, Vientiane 01000, Lao PDR. Secretariat

2.