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