Co-designing effective Nature-based Solutions in coastal West Africa

由于气候变化导致海平面上升，风暴更加频繁，沿海社区面临的沿海洪灾风险越来越大。红树林可以帮助保护社区免受这种威胁，因为它们减少了海浪和风暴潮的能量，并捕获沉积物，帮助海岸跟上海平面上升的步伐。尽管有其好处，但自1980年以来，西非三分之一的红树林已经消失。红树林木材是附近社区燃料和建筑材料的重要来源，而且也存在将红树林生长的土地用于盐生产和水稻种植的压力。为保护红树林，人们尝试了许多干预措施，但这些措施可能对人类和环境产生深远的影响，并创造出新的红树林景观，而这些景观可能无法像保护自然红树林那样保护社区。该项目将产生关于不同干预措施的反馈以及不同红树林景观在保护社区方面的有效性的新知识，并利用这些知识支持几内亚、利比里亚和塞拉利昂的社区设计保护和恢复红树林的解决方案，并保护自己免受气候变化风险的影响。并与社区合作，想象与红树林的不同生活方式。然后，我们将收集评估这些不同场景所需的证据。这包括对不同的红树林景观如何保护社区免受洪水的影响进行测量和建立模型，研究这种保护对红树林上游河流沿着采矿或森林损失等过程的敏感程度，并研究保护红树林的不同策略是否对某些人的影响大于其他人。我们将与社区一起检查这些结果，完善场景和模型，以获得共同设计的解决方案。然后，我们将与社区合作，确定他们是否有能力实施这些解决方案，并确定政府和其他组织如何帮助支持社区保护和恢复红树林。我们将评估保护和恢复红树林的不同方法是否适合取决于环境或社会因素。例如，一些河流携带大量沉积物，这些沉积物可以被小面积的红树林截留，而其他河流的沉积物较少，这些沉积物可能无法被小面积的红树林有效截留。同样，人们从砍伐红树林转向从其他来源获取木材的选择将取决于其他森林的距离，可用于种植新树木的土地数量以及从更远的地方获取木材的难易程度。我们将在西非三个国家的六个不同的河流流域开展工作，这些流域在许多环境和社会特征上都有所不同，包括它们离城市地区有多近，产品可以很容易地买卖，河流沿着的森林损失量以及过去国内冲突的经历。我们将与每个流域内三个地区的社区合作，使我们能够看到生计和习俗差异对可能解决方案的影响。这些关于环境重要性的经验教训将有助于为整个地区的红树林保护和恢复工作提供信息。

Communities living near coasts are increasingly at risk from coastal flooding as climate change raises sea-levels and causes storms to occur more frequently. Mangrove forests can help protect communities from this threat, as they reduce the energy of waves and storm surges, and trap sediment to help coasts keep pace with rising sea levels. Despite their benefit, a third of mangroves in West Africa have been lost since 1980. Mangrove wood is an important source of fuel and construction material for communities living nearby, and there are also pressures to use the land mangroves grow on for salt production and rice farming. Many interventions have been tried to protect mangroves, but these can have far-reaching consequences for people and the environment, and create novel mangrove landscapes which may not protect communities in the same way as natural mangroves. This project will generate new knowledge about the feedbacks from different interventions and the effectiveness of different mangrove landscapes at protecting communities, and use this to support communities in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to design solutions to protect and restore mangroves, and protect themselves from climate change risks.We will build on the knowledge communities have of mangroves, their changes and their relationship with people, and work with communities to imagine different ways of living with mangroves. We will then collect the evidence needed to evaluate these different scenarios. This includes making measurements and models of how different mangrove landscapes protect communities from flooding, looking at how sensitive this protection is to processes such as mining or forest loss along the rivers upstream of the mangroves, and seeing whether different strategies to protect mangroves affect some people more than others. We will examine these results with communities, refining scenarios and models to arrive at co-designed solutions. We will then work with communities to identify whether they have the power to implement these solutions, and identify how governments and other organisations can help support communities to protect and restore mangroves.We will assess whether the suitability of different approaches for protecting and restoring mangroves depends on the environment or on social factors. For example, some rivers carry a lot of sediment which could be trapped by small areas of mangroves, while other rivers have less sediment which may not be effectively trapped by small patches of mangroves. Likewise, options for people to switch from cutting mangroves to getting wood from alternative sources will depend on how close other forests are, the amount of land available for planting new trees, and the ease of bringing wood in from further afield. We will work in six different river catchments in three countries in West Africa, which differ in many environmental and social characteristics including how close they are to urban areas where products can be easily bought or sold, the amount of forest loss along the rivers and experience of past civil conflicts. We will work with communities in three areas within each catchment, allowing us to see the effect of differences in livelihoods and customs on possible solutions. These lessons learnt about the importance of context will be valuable for informing efforts to protect and restore mangroves across the region.