Natural hazards increasingly threaten alpine infrastructures and livelihoods due to climate change and expanding settlement, while the sustainability of conventional grey protective structures is constrained by high maintenance demands. Nature-based solutions (NbS) offer more cost-effective, adaptive protection that can strengthen over time, making them central to climate-resilient hazard management. This paper presents a systematic methodology that integrates a three-level hazard classification with an expert assessment of 74 NbS against 29 hazards, followed by Principal Component Analysis to derive six functional NbS groupings based on shared mitigation characteristics. Two key innovations, a Mitigation Score and a Hazard Mitigation Profile, enable dynamic evaluation of NbS performance across all phases of the hazard management cycle, revealing substantial variation in mitigation potential among hazard types, with erosion processes scoring highest (1.90), fluvial and pluvial floods showing moderate scores (1.64–1.66), and impact and coastal floods exhibiting comparatively limited mitigation options (1.00–1.42). The resulting framework provides an operational link between specific climate-related hazards and targeted NbS, supporting planners, engineers, and policymakers in designing temporally explicit, adaptive management strategies to ensure the long-term effectiveness of NbS.
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