This record provides an overview of the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub small-scale study - "A national inventory of implemented nature-based solutions to mitigate coastal hazards". For specific data outputs from this project, please see child records associated with this metadata.

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Climate change and population growth are accelerating the need for diverse solutions to coastal protection. Traditionally, shorelines are armoured with conventional "hard" or "grey" engineering structures such as seawalls which are non-adaptive and come with significant economic, environmental and social costs. While hard structures will continue to have a place in coastal protection, alternative methods that are more sustainable and climate-resilient should be more broadly adopted into the future where appropriate.

Living shorelines harness natural ecosystems to reduce coastal erosion and flooding and provide co-benefits such as carbon sequestration. They may consist of dunes, wetlands and biogenic reefs: either alone (‘soft approach’) or in combination with hard structures (‘hybrid approach’). To date, nature-based solutions have been underutilised in Australia, due at least in part to decision-makers needing clearer guidelines for when a soft, hybrid or hard coastal defence approach is most appropriate. This resulted in the publication of a foundational guide (led by Morris and Swearer and delivered under ESCC Hub Project 5.9: Natural habitats for coastal protection and carbon sequestration) to inform the national use of nature-based methods for coastal hazard risk reduction. In the process of producing these guidelines, the lack of a national inventory of coastal protection projects already using nature-based methods was identified by end-users as a priority to enable their wider adoption as an adaptation strategy in Australia.

This project generated an online inventory of all current and planned on-ground actions by coastal land managers that have implemented a nature-based solution (NBS) to mitigate coastal hazards. From this, the "Living Shorelines Australia" ( https://livingshorelines.com.au) database was created. This inventory is the first step in identifying best practice, which will inform the future development of detailed technical design guidelines for implementing different nature-based methods in Australia.

Outputs

• A national inventory of existing implemented nature-based solutions to mitigate coastal hazards [dataset]

• Final Project Report [written]