Scaling up nature-based solutions for food security and climate resilience in wetlands: typologies, barriers and opportunities

Ecosystem and land degradation, biodiversity loss, and food security are critical challenges today, especially in developing countries. Climate change exacerbates these risks, impacting agricultural systems, wetlands, and food security. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) help mitigate these challenges by protecting, managing, and restoring ecosystems across forests, agriculture, wetlands, and coastal areas; therefore, their widespread adoption is crucial for future food security and resilience. For wider scaling up, a basic understanding of the NbS concept, along with its barriers and opportunities for scaling up, is critical. However, systematic documentation of barriers and opportunities of NbS and NbS typologies for different sectors is poorly done. Existing information is scanty and scattered, particularly for wetlands. Through a systematic review and analysis of relevant literature using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method, this study analyzes NbS for enhancing resilience in wetland ecosystems, identifies barriers and opportunities for adoption of NbS, provides recommendations for their scaling up, and suggests NbS typologies for different sectors and themes. It revealed that barriers such as poor awareness, knowledge gaps, technological hesitancy, ecological and geographic challenges, institutional and policy obstacles, and financial constraints hinder the widespread adoption of NbS. Opportunities to address these barriers include customized technologies, robust policy frameworks, increased funding, and capacity building supported by collaborative efforts across sectors and traditional knowledge. Policy reforms and diverse financing mechanisms are crucial for scaling up NbS, ultimately enhancing food security, environmental sustainability, and climate resilience. The typologies are grouped in ecosystem-based, climate-based, socioeconomy-based, and objective-based. It is an important contribution to the field and a strategic roadmap for scaling up NbS in different socio-economic and environmental settings, ultimately accelerating their adoption and promoting sustainability.