Nature-based Solutions for Climate and Disaster Risk Mitigation in SIPLAS: A Framework for Policy Integration and Innovative Financing

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a case study on NbS integration and financing barriers in small island protected areas, useful for comparative research on climate adaptation governance.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a four-pronged strategy for mainstreaming NbS that can inform project design and financing approaches for island or coastal communities.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for policy integration and diversified financing to scale NbS, relevant for national and local adaptation planning.

Small island protected areas face compounding pressures from rapid urbanization, constrained land use, biodiversity loss, and intensifying climate and disaster risk, yet scholarship on how to finance and mainstream Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in governance-complex, nationally protected island systems remains limited. This study addresses that gap by examining the integration of NbS into climate and disaster risk management and development planning for the Siargao Island Protected Landscape and Seascape (SIPLAS), Philippines. The study combines five key informant interviews (KIIs) with local actors representing government, civil society, business, and protected area management with a systematic review of twelve national and international policy frameworks and technical toolkits. Results show that NbS initiatives in SIPLAS remain concentrated in four areas: mangrove restoration, coral reef conservation, sustainable tourism as an enabling condition, and community-based conservation, while ecosystem service valuation, blue carbon mechanisms, and standardized monitoring remain underdeveloped. Interview and documentary evidence indicate that the main barriers to scaling NbS are fragmented governance across local government units (LGUs) and the Protected Area Management Board (PAMB), limited and projectized financing pipelines, and the absence of robust metrics to demonstrate ecological and socio-economic returns. The post-Odette USAID SIBOL rapid biodiversity assessment in SIPLAS recorded 325 species of flora and fauna and identified revegetation, stronger environmental enforcement, and landscape-scale restoration planning as priority actions, reinforcing the island's strong ecological basis for NbS expansion. Globally, finance for nature-based solutions reached about US$200 billion in 2022, but this represented only around one-third of the level needed by 2030, highlighting the structural financing gap confronting local NbS implementation. The paper proposes a four-pronged mainstreaming strategy: policy integration, cross-sectoral collaboration, phased and diversified financing, and robust monitoring and evaluation. The resulting framework offers a replicable model for governance-complex small island communities seeking to translate global NbS commitments into locally actionable and financially sustainable programs.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.32942/x2zm28first seen 2026-05-05 19:14:00 · last seen 2026-05-15 16:48:20