Building urban resilience with nature-based solutions

Cities face increasing environmental, social and economic challenges that together threaten the resilience of urban areas. These challenges include chronic stresses and acute shocks, amplified by climate change impacts.

Nature-based solutions have emerged as a concept for integrating ecosystem-based approaches to address a range of societal challenges. Nature-based solutions include the green and blue spaces of cities, such as parks, street trees, water-sensitive urban design, and coastal structures such as mangroves and dunes.

Implementing urban nature-based solutions is inherently complex, given the range of ecosystem services, their multi-functionality and trade-offs between functions, and across time and spatial scales. Urban planning can support the implementation of nature-based solutions, by managing trade-offs and conflicts, as well as addressing social equity dimensions.

In a new CAUL Hub paper, researchers present a framework to guide the application of urban planning to nature-based solutions’ implementation to support urban resilience.

Photo by Rafał Rudol on Unsplash

 

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