Acknowledge and account for interdependencies and trade-offs: Nature-based Solutions must be grounded in a shared understanding of available options, their costs and benefits, and the social and ecological impacts, both positive and negative. This requires a systemic, landscape-level perspective that considers interdependencies between environmental and social dimensions across multiple scales. It is important to recognise that win-win scenarios are extremely difficult to achieve; and that trade-offs and conflicts are inevitable. Effective NbS shift the focus from maximizing efficiency to fostering resilience and multifunctionality across ecosystems, landscapes, and communities. Capacity to navigate uncertainty and complexity: Strong planning abilities as well as locally established implementation capacities are essential for NbS projects to succeed. This includes technical competence, organizational strength, access to resources, the ability to retain expertise over the long term, and robust capacity to mobilize and deploy teams effectively on the ground, including in remote or hard-to-access areas. Project teams – whether through direct staffing or partnerships – must be equipped to manage interrelated ecological, social, and economic objectives. Leverage interdisciplinary expertise: Involving social scientists, anthropologists, behavioural experts, and local knowledge holders early alongside technical and ecological specialists, helps uncover implicit assumptions and design culturally grounded interventions. Embed adaptive learning: MEL systems should be designed to track, test, and adapt assumptions throughout the lifecycle, with feedback loops that enable communities to influence decisions. Project teams should treat plans as working assumptions rather than fixed intentions and foster regular learning sessions to review where assumptions have failed and collaboratively identify adaptive strategies. 2.2. Testing Key Social Assumptions in NbS Project Design: Questions and Data for Validation Building on the Nature Conservancy’s extensive research and framework for identifying assumptions within conservation practice (Opatovsky et al., 2025), and informed by practitioner insights from decades of NbS design and implementation, this paper brings to the fore 3 critical assumption areas that consistently shape NbS project outcomes in practice: A) Local Ownership & Governance B) Economics & Behaviours C) Impact & Scalability 77
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