Nature-Based Solutions
Nature-based solutions (NbS) provide layered ecosystem services and human health benefits while addressing environmental issues and supporting urban growth. NbS have the potential to achieve mutual benefits for people and nature by reducing CO2 emissions, creating green jobs, unlocking approximately 10 trillion USD of business opportunities, and lowering biodiversity loss by 50%.
NbS can be divided into three primary categories:
- Restorative solutions which prioritize restoring degraded ecosystems.
- Adaptative solutions which integrate NbS into existing infrastructure.
- Transformative solutions which aim to implement changes in policy to mainstream NbS.
To realize the full transformative potential of NbS, there is a need to recognize their multi-functionality, economic benefits, and the need for scalability. By integrating NbS into existing infrastructure, enhancing collaboration, fostering public-private partnerships, and engaging communities, NbS can produce transformative policy changes.
NbS are becoming increasingly relevant in urban planning as cities are facing the various consequences of a changing climate such as floods, heatwaves, storms, and droughts. Traditional grey infrastructure only supports one concern at a time, such as roads or water systems. Alternatively, we can harness the mutual benefits of NbS into a pathway towards sustainable and green growth. By investing in NbS, we can address climate challenges while fostering resilience and sustainability.
As NbS are community–based, Extension can contribute to NbS in several ways. They can provide direct expertise related to the NbS or the ecosystem service, they connect the community to university-based expertise, and they can provide community support services such as community engagement on the selection and location of NbS, facilitating the implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of NbS, and helping to reduce potential gentrification impacts of NbS in underserved communities.
Elyse Blondell
NATURA Fellow
Email: click to contact
The above Interactive Systems Map provides a visual of the interconnected benefits of NbS and how ecosystem services can be amplified to maximize benefits. By hovering over a NbS on the left, you can see the ecosystem serves it provides, or conversely, but hovering over an ecosystem service on the right, you can see what NbS contribute to that service. Thus, the diagram can serve as a decision-making tool for practitioners and policy makers to identify and/or justify interventions that span multiple sectors. Additionally, the diagram aids in linking the benefits for diverse stakeholders (water management, transportation, health, biodiversity, etc.) and the need to involve communities and multiple sectors in their planning.
