Book excerpt: The Executive Summary is a shorter companion to the complete International Guidelines on Natural and Nature-Based Features for Flood Risk Management. Similarly, The Executive Summary emphasizes the role of nature-based solutions and natural infrastructure (e.g., beaches, dunes, islands, marshes) as an alternative to conventional hardened infrastructure for flood and coastal storm risk reduction and represents the state of the science on conceptualizing, planning, designing, engineering, implementing and maintaining NNBF. Like the complete Guidelines, the same design and use of icons introduce each of the chapters in 3-5 pages by highlighting key messages. Readers should reference the complete Guidelines for more detail on any of the chapter topics.