On 20 August 2020, Dr. Linxiu Zhang, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme-International Ecosystem Management Partnership (UNEP-IEMP), was invited to participate in the "Nature-based Solutions (NbS) Cooperation Platform Workshop" hosted by the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development (ICCSD) Tsinghua University.
Director Linxiu Zhang was invited as an expert from international organizations to share her insights. In the workshop, Director Linxiu Zhang introduced UNEP’s involvement and role played in NbS. In addition, she demonstrated UNEP-IEMP’s work on NbS implementation through a case study from Nepal. She presented the Nexus approach UNEP-IEMP promotes and the key results and impacts of the project under IEMP’s flagship programme Climate change-Ecosystems-Livelihood.
- Finally, Director Zhang shared the key messages for NbS implementation derived from UNEP-IEMP’s experiences as the following:
- • Implement nexus approach for multi-benefits
- • Design concrete livelihoods options to capture the interest of communities and private funding, such as ecotourism
- • Building local capacity and knowledge for up-scaling
- • Science-based experiments and monitoring& research on NBS, before up-scaling
- • Ensure sustainability through political ownership, community participation and long-term partnerships
The workshop invited a diverse group to exchange their ideas on NbS, including representatives from international organizations such as UN, WEF and GCF, corporates professionals and professors and students from China’s top universities and research institutions.
NbS is a crucial measure in achieving the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals. It is a subject undergoing intense discussion in the fields of biodiversity conservation and dealing with climate change. The NbS cooperative platform was established to foster collective wisdom from multi-stakeholders in China and globally to explore and leverage NbS to improve the global governance process.
As one of the monthly workshop series, this workshop focuses on sharing international frontier case studies, exchange experiences and lesson learned on the topic of NbS in addressing to climate change.
It was a good opportunity for UNEP-IEMP to showcase its work and demonstrate its impacts made through NbS in addressing not only climate change, but also ecosystem and livelihood as a UN collaborating center.
