Abstract

Climate change (CC) and environmental degradation are severely affecting marine and coastal systems and the ecosystem goods and services on which people rely. As a result, biodiversity loss and reductions in ecosystem functioning have been recorded across marine and terrestrial systems. A transformative change in the way we adapt to CC is needed, centered around preserving and restoring nature.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) offer the opportunity to improve ecosystem resilience and biodiversity, transforming the management of nature while providing environmental and societal benefits, from individual to collective level. NbS, and their benefits, are well-known and largely implemented in terrestrial and urban environments, while less is known on the potential of NbS capacity in reducing water quality (WQ) deterioration due to climate and human-induced pressures in marine-coastal areas. The H2020 MaCoBioS project aims to respond to these needs, developing modelling approaches and analytical frameworks to facilitate the adoption of evidence informed NbS responding to environmental and restoration targets as posed by relevant EU acquis (e.g., EU Restoration law, MSFD) and specific marine and coastal archetypes. Within MaCoBioS project, a harmonized modelling framework has been created, which brings together risk assessment approaches, NbS suitability mapping and a decision-support system guiding the selection of the most appropriate NBS in marine-coastal ecosystems.

To explore the dynamic processes and interactions among climate-induced and human-made pressures driving marine WQ alteration, and to identify suitable NbS able to reduce environmental impacts on marine coastal environments, a Bayesian Network (BN) model integrated with GIS-based techniques supporting the spatial modelling and appraisal of multi-risks scenarios is developed. The designed BN spatio-temporal multi-risk model will be able to detect and unravel impacts induced by this complex interplay on ecosystem services capacity and flow and to test the effectiveness of different Nature-based management solutions to face up with the identified impacts.

The model will focus on the land-sea interface of the Apulia region (Southern Italy). Finally, the designed multi-risk model will be used for the scenario analysis, simulating multiple “what-if” scenarios, representing different climate conditions (e.g., by simulating changes on sea surface temperature, building on climate models’ input) and adaptation measures.

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