International Guidelines on Natural and Nature-Based Features for Flood Risk Management

The International Guidelines are a set of real-world guidelines resulting from a ten years of work of building, learning, and documenting the best practices for constructing Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF).

The NNBF Guidelines is intended to inform the efforts of practitioners, organizations, and communities seeking to increase the performance of Floods Risk Management (FRM) systems and achieve long‑term risk mitigation, increase water infrastructure resilience and sustainability, reduce infrastructure maintenance and repair costs, and, ultimately, increase the value produced by FRM infrastructure investments. The purpose of these guidelines is to provide a good background on the basic concepts of NNBF, as well as its potential applicability to various coastal systems (beach and dunes, coastal wetlands, islands, reefs, submerged aquatic vegetation), fluvial systems, and NNBF systems to the general reader. Several case studies of implemented NNBFs are described across the publication.

USACE in the United States, the Rijkswaterstaat Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management in the Netherlands, and the Environment Agency in the United Kingdom were the three primary government institutions that organized and led the effort of preparing these Guidelines. Many other organizations also provided critical leadership and participation, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, World Bank, National Institute of Standards and Technology, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund.