Development Aspects Impressum Editors

Old approaches:



impacts






New paradigm:
delivers/ sustains

4. Examples of natural infrastructure solutions to meet water-related challenges

Sustaining, or restoring, natural infrastructure offers solutions to help us manage a multitude of water-related problems. These centre on the interrelated needs to manage water quantity and quality and sustain broader ecosystem-wide, water- related ecosystem services.

Examples of the pitfalls of ecosystem-blind approaches abound and make a convincing case to pay more attention to better ecosystem management. But ecosystem solutions for dealing with uncertainty and risk are best demonstrated through practice, and there is currently a wholesale shift towards this approach. Some stakeholders in the business sector are leading by example. For example, the World Resources Institute (WRI), working in conjunction with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), has developed the “Corporate Ecosystem Services Review”, which helps companies to identify and measure the risks and opportunities that arise from their impact and dependence on ecosys- tem services (WRI, and others, 2008), within which water plays a prominent role. WBCSD (2011) also makes the case for ecosystem valuation as an integral part of business planning and corporate decision-making. There is a need to upscale such approaches across all relevant business activities.

1. Using natural infrastructure to manage water quality

The basic principle of water-quality management should be that healthy ecosys- tems, with some exceptions, deliver clean water in the first place. Water quality becomes subsequently degraded through human activity. Poor water quality is, therefore, essentially a problem caused by poor ecosystem management. There are two broad solutions. Firstly, deal with the symptom of the problem by treating water to rehabilitate its quality to the desired level. Mainly this is done using physi- cal water-treatment facilities (water-treatment plants). This can be expensive and such costs are essentially incurred because of the loss of a prior ecosystem service (clean water) previously received for free. The costs of water treatment, therefore, give us an indication of the monetary value of this ecosystem service. But natural infrastructure can often also be used to the same effect, either instead of or along- side artificial approaches (Box 1). Secondly, deal with the cause of the problem by managing the ecosystem better so that water of undesirable quality does not arise at source. This, obviously, and where feasible, involves removing sources of pol- lution in the catchment. However, alongside this there is often the opportunity to use natural infrastructure to remove or mitigate the impacts of land-use activities on water quality. Examples include at the small scale by restoring vegetation in riparian (river margin) zones to capture sediments and pollutants before they enter rivers, to catchment-scale approaches (Box 2).

Source: GEF 2012.

2.