The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) decision 15/8 in 2022 mentions NbS and invites Parties to explore complementarities across Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) including, where appropriate, “in the implementation of sustainable land management, ecosystem-based approaches or naturebased solutions

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are important for the global sustainable development agenda because they offer the potential to address, in an effective way, diverse challenges such as climate change, food and water insecurity, disaster impacts, and threats to human health and wellbeing, while reducing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Some of the challenges addressed by NbS, including biodiversity loss and climate action, cannot be fully tackled without this contribution. This does not mean that other actions, such as rapid decarbonization of our economies, are not also essential.

This report:

Outlines recent developments on NbS, with a focus on global, regional and national commitments, and key issues and concerns
Builds on the new multilaterally agreed definition of NbS – agreed by the UN Environment Assembly in March 2022 – to set out key elements in the concept, provides examples of NbS, and discusses related approaches
Provides recommendations for actions by governments, civil society and the private sector to substantially scale up the use of NbS
The report aims to inform NbS-related initiatives and discussions on NbS at global, regional, and national levels, with a focus on how NbS can be scaled up to more effectively address social, economic, and environmental challenges.

As mentioned above, the UNEA of March 2022 brought together 193 Member States and delivered a multilaterally
agreed definition and description of NbS.55 UNEA decided that:

“nature-based solutions are actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified
terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services, resilience and biodiversity benefits’’.

This understanding of NbS, based on discussion and consensus among the UNEA Member States, is built upon several important features, described below and referred to in the resolution text.
While the term NbS is relatively new, it builds on a long-standing recognition of our dependence on nature
and long-standing practices for protecting, managing, and restoring ecosystems.