The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) – one of Asia’s leading not-for-profit policy research institutions and among the world’s top climate think tanks – has published a report that introduces the Effective Nature-based Solutions Utilisation and Resource Evaluation (ENSURE) framework, designed to map and estimate the benefits of Nature-based Solutions (NbS). The report focuses on low-income countries, that receive only a small fraction of NbS investments despite being more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Here more than elsewhere, the absence of standardised measures and reporting on the impacts of NbS make it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness and, consequently, hinder investments in this sector and the scaling up of successful projects. A lack of expertise and methodologies for mapping benefits further discourages investments in NbS in the Global South. Thus, the need of the hour is a common assessment framework that can help stakeholders evaluate the economic and non-economic benefits of NbS.

Conducting due diligence before implementing NbS projects will help drive investments in the sector, allow stakeholders to scale up such interventions, and maximise impact in the long run. The report provides a comprehensive understanding of NbS, details the difficulties associated with scaling and implementing such solutions, and proposes the ENSURE framework to map and estimate the benefits of NbS in the Global South. The framework will allow users to: a) identify an intervention as an NbS; b) demarcate its benefits; c) estimate the cost-to-benefit ratio by providing a standardised approach to assess and report on their outcomes and costs.

Picture credits: Alain Schroeder / Climate Visuals (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)