Stakeholders’ views on natural flood management: Implications for the nature-based solutions paradigm shift?

Public Acceptance of Nature-Based Solutions for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction: Survey Findings From Three Study Sites in Europe

“…The ubiquity of this terminology is indicative of the shift towards increased reliance on public support (i.e., non-state actors and individuals) (Mees et al, 2012;Penning-Rowsell and Johnson 2015;Bubeck et al, 2017;Begg et al, 2018;Kuhlicke et al, 2020;Zingraff-Hamed et al, 2020;Puskás et al, 2021) that has also been codified in relevant policy such as the European Water Framework Directive (European Commission 2000). Indeed, this shift has been most prominently manifested in the context of flood risk management in Europe (Begg et al, 2011;Begg et al, 2018;Bark et al, 2021) and promoted as a departure from a "decide, announce, defend" practitioner-public interaction model to an "engage, deliberate, decide" approach (Daly et al, 2015). An increasing reliance on the public for addressing environmental risk has been attributed to, among other reasons, a decline in trust in policy-makers (van der Vegt 2018), a push for increased legitimacy and democratic decision-making, a recognition of improved outcomes (Begg et al, 2018;Zingraff-Hamed et al, 2020), the ability to break gridlock and prevent litigation (Irvin and Stansbury 2004), and the extra burden on disaster risk managers due to climate change and land-use conflict (Wamsler et al, 2019).…”

“…A greater reliance on local stakeholders for cooperation with NbS during implementation, maintenance, management, and monitoring phases means public acceptance is crucial for their success (Ferreira et al, 2020;Anderson and Renaud 2021;Bark et al, 2021;Puskás et al, 2021). The multi-functionality of NbS entails greater opportunity for stakeholder participation but also greater risk of conflict (Naumann and Kaphengst 2015;Connop et al, 2016;European Commission 2021).…”

Designing a Flood Storage Option on Agricultural Land: What Can Flood Risk Managers Learn from Drought Management?

“…Issues around bundling or stacking different ecosystem services [44] are moot. Through other research [47] and consultancy, we infer that UK farmers have a clear motivation to produce food, but that in exploring PES, the option to stack ecosystem services is attractive, as it would enable them to receive a discrete payment from a buyer for each ecosystem service delivered, often from the same land. Such a stackable PES may attract potential private and conservation buyers for specific ecosystem services, for example, water companies might buy water quality improvements and insurance companies might buy flood regulation services.…”

“…In contrast, PES buyers might prefer bundling, whereby they pay for one ecosystem service, for example, flood regulation, and receive other ecosystem services delivered as part of the project as co-benefits. Research into wider stakeholder attitudes about NFM in the UK, note that whilst many stakeholders believe co-benefits from NFM interventions are key to the support for NFM that other stakeholders would prefer NFM delivery to focus solely on flood risk reduction [47]. Critical to these discussions is, are ecosystem services synergistically delivered or traded off?…”

“…There is potential for a PES or other negotiated agreement whereby the beneficiary, for instance, a new type of authority, such as the Somerset Rivers Authority [45], or a town or city, pays farmers for changes to their land and water management practices [33,46]. As floodplain floodwater storage options are novel and farmers are cautious to adopt NFM interventions [47], particularly larger-scale interventions [33], salient lessons on incentive design might be forthcoming from elsewhere, for example, from farm-centred drought management.…”