Mandy Paauw, Phd Candidate at the Centre of Research on Environmental and Social Change – University of Antwerp, was the speaker for this session.

She talked about her master thesis results and connected the dots with her PhD
approaches and SOLARIS’ goals around climate change and inequalities.

This previous work focussed on the environmental and policy feasibility of nature-based solutions in the Rhine and Mekong deltas. For the environmental feasibility, Mandy took projections of environmental change for four variables (sea-level rise, land subsidence, sediment availability and land-use change) and compared these with the requirements for nature-based solutions in deltas. For the policy feasibility, she argued that we need adaptive forms of governance to implement nature-based solutions in deltas, and therefore she analysed the Rhine and Mekong delta plans against key dimensions of adaptive governance. The results basically showed that environmental change significantly constrains the feasibility of nature-based solutions in deltas, which is why we need to fundamentally transform deltas to a more sustainable regime. Adaptive governance may not be suitable to transform systems, we might need a combination of adaptive, transformative and interactive governance, depending on the local situation or case at hand.