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During the past decades, risk assessment experienced increasing interest in social science but also natural science and other disciplines. At the same time, risk reduction and mitigation gained in interest from local to global level due to the shift from reactive to proactive management. Hazard and risk assessment have been approached on different levels, nonetheless, they are lacking elements such as cross-border assessment or the integration of an ecological risk assessment. One of the objectives of the H2020 Operandum project is to provide an automated science-based assessment of risk for the social-ecological system and further of the applicability and performance of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) for risk mitigation of hydro-meteorological hazards.Within this project, an interactive webGIS analytical engine and an NBS catalogue are being developed as part of the Geospatial Information Knowledge Platform (GeoIKP). The analytical engine will encompass open Europe-wide hazard maps and link them with local high-resolution information from public and innovative data sources (e.g. Facebook). These two geo-tools are combined into a recommendation engine - NBS toolkit - trained on existing NBS. Using a holistic approach, the NBS toolkit aims at providing risk assessment and advanced recommendations on NBS usage for mitigation. For this approach, the NBS toolkit incorporates hazard and risk assessment in space and time, cost-benefit analysis, and additionally main drivers and constraints for NBS implementations as well as their geographical transferability, replicability and performance/effectiveness. This contribution will offer an insight into the concept and development of the NBS toolkit. Primarily, it will focus on the added value of the NBS toolkit for future nature-based implementation, risk mitigation management and decision-making at all levels. Challenges and current limitations of real-time risk assessment will also be discussed, with a focus on their implications on NBS monitoring and effectiveness.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly being implemented as suitable approaches for reducing vulnerabilityand risk of social-ecological systems (SES) to hydro-meteorological hazards. Understanding vulnerabilityand risk of SES is crucial in order to design and implement NBS projects appropriately. A systematic literaturereview was carried out to examine the suitability of, or gaps in, existing frameworks for vulnerability and riskassessment of SES to hydro-meteorological hazards. The review confirms that very few frameworks have beendeveloped in the context of NBS. Most of the frameworks have emphasised social systems over ecological systems.Furthermore, they have not explicitly considered the temporal dimension of risk reduction measures. Thestudy proposes an indicator-based vulnerability and risk assessment framework in the context of NBS (VR-NBS)that addresses both the above limitations and considers established NBS principles. The framework aims to allowfor a better consideration of the multiple benefits afforded by NBS and which impact all the dimensions of risk. Alist of 135 indicators is identified through literature review and surveys in NBS project sites. This list is composedof indicators representing the social sub-system (61% of total indicators) and the ecological sub-system (39% oftotal indicators). The list will act as a reference indicator library in the context of NBS projects and will beregularly updated as lessons are learnt. While the proposed VR-NBS framework is developed considering hydrometeorologicalhazards and NBS, it can be adapted for other natural hazards and different types of risk reductionmeasures.