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Benefits, Applications, and Opportunities of Natural Infrastructure: A Workshop

Completed

The National Academies hosted a workshop on the benefits, applications, and opportunities of natural infrastructure. This includes aspects of the natural landscape, from mangroves and marshes to municipal green infrastructure. The workshop explored natural infrastructure applications and efficacy in natural hazard resilience, climate change adaptation, and sustainable, multi-purpose infrastructure to advance and mainstream natural infrastructure and nature-based solutions in public and private engineering practice. Speakers included experts in engineering of natural and traditional infrastructure, sustainability, resilience, social sciences, and economics. The objective was to build recognition, understanding, support, and awareness of the applications of natural infrastructure.

Description

An ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will organize a two-day workshop on the benefits, applications, and opportunities of natural infrastructure (i.e., aspects of the natural landscape such as coastal wetlands, beaches, dunes, marshes, mangrove forests, municipal green infrastructure, and living shorelines)which can provide multiple benefits, e.g., for natural hazard risk reduction and ecosystem functioning. The workshop will convene experts from federal, state and/or local government, the private sector, the philanthropic community, academia, and nongovernmental organizations to discuss natural infrastructure applications and efficacy in areas such as natural hazard resilience, climate change adaptation, and sustainable, multi-purpose infrastructure. Participants will also explore opportunities to link the benefits of natural infrastructure across geographic scales and multiple objectives, and to advance and mainstream natural infrastructure and nature-based solutions in public and private engineering practice. A proceedings of a workshop in brief will be prepared by a designated rapporteur. Following the publication of the proceedings, a dissemination event will be held to discuss natural infrastructure in context of more comprehensive and equitable evaluation of benefits from nature based solutions.

Collaborators

Committee

Chair

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Negin Sobhani

Staff Officer

Sponsors

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Staff

Negin Sobhani

Lead

Danielle Goldsmith

Reginald Hayes

Berna Oztekin-Gunaydin

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