Flood defense strategies have evolved from hard-engineered systems to nature-based solutions that advocate for sustainability to meet today’s environmental, social, and economic goals. This paper aims to analyze the historical progression and evolutionary trends in flood control strategies that have led to nature-based solutions. An evaluative literature review was conducted to narrate the evolution of nature-based flood management approaches for different flood types, river floods, coastal floods, and stormwater run-offs. The analysis reflected three evolutionary trends: the transformation of hard measures to soft measures; secondly, the increase in society’s attention to ecosystems and their services; and, finally, divergence from single-function solutions to multi-function solutions. However, continuous monitoring and evaluation of the previous projects and adapting to the lessons learned are the key to progress towards sustainable flood management strategies and their societal acceptance.

Contract attributes are strong motivators for eliciting farmers’ preferences for a particular agri-environmental scheme. Our study aims to conduct a systematic literature review to highlight the attributes used in choice experiment studies of agri-environmental schemes using the PRISMA framework. We obtained 34 studies for an in-depth review, through which we extracted 32 attributes that were classified into five typologies: ‘monetary’ (7 attributes), ‘general’ (4 attributes), ‘flexibility’ (6 attributes), ‘prescription’ (12 attributes), and ‘purpose’ (3 attributes). Though monetary attributes should theoretically define farmers’ choices; general design and flexibility attributes are more critical for farmers’ participation and willingness to accept. The study also discusses the lesser-used attributes that could be potentially explored in future studies. Thus, our review can be used as a reference by future AES studies to select their bundle of choice attributes and test with a broader range of attributes in their choice experiments.