13 minute read
Introduction
Connecting Projects Around the World
Background
"Nature does nothing in vain." —Aristotle
There is tremendous value in nature. People are drawn to different aspects of that value, depending on their perspectives and purposes. For millennia, humans have extracted resources from nature through hunting, mining, damming, and logging. However, nature’s value includes more than material resources. To be sure, trees can provide fuel, lumber, and cellulose. But trees are also beautiful (aesthetic value). Children—and some adults—climb trees (social value). Trees are habitat for animals (environmental value). And trees can also be infrastructure, in that they can provide services associated with engineering functions. Trees near buildings can reduce the costs of cooling those buildings in the summer (e.g., by shading) and heating those same buildings in the winter (e.g., by buffering winds). Trees and their root systems can provide hydrologic value by increasing surface water infiltration that reduces flooding and increases groundwater recharge. Trees can also improve air quality by filtering particulate matter and other pollutants, in addition to sequestering carbon.
Humanity faces many challenges in the twenty-first century related to supporting a human population that is expected to exceed 10 billion by the end of the century, mitigating the increasing risks posed by natural hazards, and climate change. Whether we frame the future in terms of problems to resolve or opportunities to develop, nature will figure prominently in the outcomes of our pursuits. The overarching need before us is to figure out how to discover, preserve, expand, and apply nature’s value. Engineering that extracts value can leave marks on nature. Engineering to control nature has resulted in a combination of partial successes and dramatic failures. Engineering that partners with nature holds great promise in the twenty-first century, building on lessons developed through recent and distant experiences. Partnering with nature to produce expanded and diversified value is the central motivation for Engineering With Nature® (EWN®) and the growing movement to develop and implement nature-based solutions.
The timeline marking the conceptualization, methodological development, and application of nature-based solutions is long and passes through many technical fields. Different definitions of nature-based solutions and related terms (e.g., ecosystem-based approaches and natural infrastructure) have been used by many organizations pursuing the approach. However, the predominant element among these definitions is the focus on conserving, restoring, and engineering nature for the benefit of people and the ecosystems we inhabit. It is difficult to pinpoint the very beginning of the nature-based-solutions timeline, but it stretches across several decades. In the 1960s, the ecologist Howard T. Odum and others developed a foundation for ecological engineering; and in 1969, the landscape architect Ian McHarg published his seminal book Design with Nature. The introduction to Design with Nature was written by the prolific polymath Lewis Mumford, who wrote
McHarg’s emphasis is not on either design or nature by itself, but upon the preposition with, which implies human cooperation and biological partnership. He seeks, not arbitrarily to impose design, but to use to the fullest the potentialities—and with them, necessarily, the restrictive conditions—that nature offers.[1]
It is worthwhile to note that among other awards, Mumford and McHarg were recognized for their respective accomplishments by three different Presidents of the United States. Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan in 1986. In 1990, McHarg received the National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush who said when conferring the award that “I hope that in the twenty-first century the largest accomplishment of art will be to restore the earth.”[2]
Discovering the full value of nature and developing and delivering projects that apply that value will involve engineering across a range of scales. A single tree can be a source of pleasure for a group of children. A copse of trees can reduce energy usage for a building. An entire forest and networks of forests can reduce flood risks and damage from hurricanes. A recent study found that mangrove forests along the coast of Florida in the U.S. are averting billions of dollars in flood damages from extreme storms by attenuating storm surge and waves.[3] A small pocket of wetlands can provide an afternoon of adventure for birdwatchers, productive outings for a local community of anglers, and water-quality improvements associated with land-based nutrient discharges. A network of natural and nature-based wetlands across an entire watershed or bay can reduce flood damages from small and large storms, including hurricanes.[4] Many other examples, ranging the full scope of nature’s landscapes, could be used to illustrate the fact that nature holds tremendous value; and many such examples are illustrated within the pages of this Atlas. The challenge and opportunity before us is to figure out how to integrate this value into our collective engineering of infrastructure in the twenty-first century and beyond.
[1] Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Wiley, 1992), viii.
[2] McHarg, vi.
[3] Siddharth Narayan, Christopher Thomas, Joss Matthewman, Christine C. Shepard, Laura Geselbracht, Kechi Nzerem, and Michael W. Beck, Valuing the Flood Risk Reduction Benefits of Florida’s Mangroves (The Nature Conservancy, Gulf of Mexico Program, 2019), 2–4.
[4] Siddharth Narayan, Michael W. Beck, Paul Wilson, Christopher J. Thomas, Alexandra Guerrero, Christine C. Shepard, Borja G. Reguero, Guillermo Franco, Jane Carter Ingram, and Dania Trespalacios, “The Value of Coastal Wetlands for Flood Damage Reduction in the Northeastern USA,” Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 9463, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-09269-z
The EWN Initiative
The Engineering With Nature Initiative formally began in 2010 within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a way to highlight good-past-practice examples, while advancing current and future capabilities, for integrating nature’s value into engineering projects. In the last 10 years, the initiative has grown to include many partner organizations and collaborators. The initiative supports more sustainable water resources and infrastructure practices, projects, and outcomes by pursuing the intentional alignment of natural and engineering processes to efficiently and sustainably deliver economic, environmental, and social benefits through collaboration (www.engineeringwithnature.org).
Four critical elements define the EWN approach:
Using science and engineering to produce operational efficiencies
Using natural processes to maximize benefit
Increasing the value provided by projects to include social, environmental, and economic benefits
Using collaborative processes to organize, engage, and focus interests, stakeholders, and partners
As with the original book, EWN Atlas, Volume 2 uses these four critical elements to define progress and success related to EWN and to provide the structure for describing each of the representative projects. With this, we can more easily highlight the efficiencies produced, the natural processes used, the project benefits provided, and the collaborative partners engaged.
A Global Community of Collaboration on Nature-Based Solutions
Sharing examples of EWN practice and learning from project examples around the world is the motivation for the EWN Atlas series. As with the first volume of the Atlas, we chose the current collection of projects to illustrate a diverse portfolio of circumstances, inspirations, obstacles, and achievements. All of the projects in this Atlas highlight the importance of collaboration to innovating and creating diversified project value (i.e., multipurpose projects). They showcase the benefits that can be produced when engineering and natural processes are successfully integrated to support navigation, flood risk management, ecosystem restoration, and other infrastructure purposes. Each project example introduces unique facets of developing sustainable projects while also revealing the four common elements of EWN.
Over the last 10 years, there has been a growing wave of interest and progress in developing nature-based approaches. One can attempt to quantify this interest in different ways, including the significant growth in publications on the topic in peer-reviewed and other technical literature. At the time of this writing, a simple Google search on the term “nature-based solutions” provided more than 2 million results. For those actively involved in the effort to advance nature-based solutions, the forward movement has been both obvious and meaningful.
Today, an increasing number of organizations across both the public and private sectors are investing in nature-based solutions, as demonstrated by the more than 26 organizations that nominated projects to appear in this Atlas. These contributions illustrate that government organizations with infrastructure responsibilities are increasingly investing in nature-based solutions (e.g., U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; Environment Agency in England; Rijkswaterstaat in the Netherlands; Scottish Environment Protection Agency; Pierce County, Washington, U.S.; among others). Public agencies with environmental and conservation missions are incorporating engineering and social value into projects to complement the environmental benefits created (e.g., U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Flemish Agency for Nature and Forest). A range of private companies are investing in nature-based solutions to either support their own physical assets and landscapes or by supporting such projects with materials and engineering design and construction services (e.g., Dow Inc., Boskalis, ECOncrete, Inter-Fluve, Van Oord, Atlantic Reef Maker, and more). Knowledge institutions, universities, and technical associations are also actively engaged in advancing nature-based practice (e.g., EcoShape, University of Glasgow, University of Kansas, University of Dundee, etc.). Nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations are partnering across sectors to deliver nature-based solutions (e.g., The Nature Conservancy, Natuurmonumenten, the Woodland Trust, the West Cumbria River Trust, Restore the Earth Foundation, and others).
Work on nature-based solutions is expanding on both national and international scales. While context and specifics can vary among communities and countries, the commonalities that exist are a significant driver of progress at the international level. To draw attention to widespread progress being made in integrating nature into planning, design, construction, and operation of engineering projects, we have used the globe symbol (below) to identify projects outside of the United States.
Connectivity to Natural Hazards and Flood Risk Management
Natural hazards result in thousands of lost lives and many billions of dollars in damage worldwide every year. The toll taken by natural hazards varies across time, regions, and countries. The U.S. can be used as a specific example of the scope of the problem. Between 1980 and 2020, the U.S. experienced 285 weather and climate disasters where damages reached or exceeded $1 billion (consumer price index adjusted to 2020). The total amount of damages produced across all of these events exceeds $1.8 trillion.[5]
Flooding is responsible for a significant amount of the annual loss of life and economic damages caused by natural hazards in the U.S. and worldwide. Future improvements and investments in conventional engineering solutions for flooding offer some promise for “buying down” these damages. However, expanding application of nature-based solutions arguably offers even greater potential for achieving long-term risk mitigation for flooding and other natural hazards. It has been estimated that between 2020 and midcentury, $100 trillion will be invested in infrastructure development worldwide, including infrastructure related to flood risk management and natural hazards.[6] There are some “big” questions to consider with respect to that investment: What will that infrastructure look like? How will nature be incorporated as a part of the solution? How will it work? What range of value will the infrastructure produce?
Natural and nature-based features (NNBF) is a term used to describe the use of landscape features to provide engineering functions relevant to flood risk management while also producing a range of other economic, environmental, and social benefits. NNBF can be incorporated into riverine/fluvial and coastal systems and includes such features as beaches and dunes, islands, forests, wetlands, and reefs, all of which can occur naturally or be constructed as nature-based features through human engineering. The EWN Initiative and other programs worldwide have invested in NNBF application by supporting research and development, technology transfer, stakeholder engagement, and full-scale project implementation. By way of example, the EWN Initiative has led a multiyear international effort to develop and publish (expected in 2021) technical guidelines for NNBF. This project brought together more than 180 people from 10 countries and 77 organizations across the public, private, nonprofit and academic sectors.
NNBF represents an opportunity to achieve both flood risk management and sustainability goals. Engineers, environmental scientists, conservationist, social scientists, government leaders, and the public at large have important roles to play in the process of innovating new, sustainable solutions for persistent and growing flood risk management problems. Projects in the EWN Atlas, Volume 2 that were developed as NNBF projects are designated using the following symbol:
[5] “U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Information, (Asheville, NC: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Information, 2021), https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/.
[6] World Economic Forum, The Green Investment Report: The Ways and Means to Unlock Private Finance for Green Growth (Geneva, Switzerland World Economic Forum, 2013).
With a View Toward the Future
"Listen to the voice of nature, for it holds treasures for you." —Wendat proverb
Before readers explore the EWN exemplars in this Atlas, there is benefit in creating a mindset that is fit for the purpose. The 62 projects described in the following pages represent only a sample of an everincreasing number of interventions and projects that illustrate a partnership between engineering and nature. While exploring these example projects, we encourage readers to consider the following questions:
What lessons do they teach?
How could EWN support my community?
What opportunities are there for creating new value through EWN in my sphere of activity?
What obstacles exist for advancing the application of nature-based solutions?
How can I contribute to the innovation needed to advance EWN and expand the value of infrastructure in the twenty-first century?
The future is shaped by understanding what others have done and then considering the potential for doing even more.
