Integrating green infrastructure, ecosystem services and nature-based solutions for urban sustainability: A comprehensive literature review

Abstract

Urban nature is critical to addressing sustainability challenges. Three concepts capture the core of this field: Urban Ecosystem Services (UES, benefits humans derived from urban nature), Green Infrastructure (GI, interconnected networks of green space), and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS, actions to protect, manage and restore ecosystems that address societal challenges). Integrating these three fields helps break down disciplinary barriers and leverage their strengths to achieve urban sustainability. However, how to integrate them to promote urban sustainability is still unclear. Here we present a bibliometric analysis of 13,307 English papers published in global SCI journals (i.e., indexed by Web of Science) during 1990–2022. We found that (1) UES and GI have entered the exponential growth phase since 2014, while NBS is still in the emerging phase. (2) UES themes focus on urban social-ecological system mechanisms. Both the GI and NBS themes focus on using specific green space types to address specific sustainability challenges, but the GI emphasizes a planning perspective while NBS is a broader umbrella concept that includes more actions. (3) UES, GI, and NBS originated from different academic backgrounds, but have learned from each other and influenced each other in the process of development, forming a stable cooperation network. Our findings suggest that the evolution from UES and GI to NBS not only represents a change in terminology but also marks the efforts of different fields to achieve urban sustainability. Moving forward, these three fields must identify their respective ecological niches and explore potential synergies to enhance urban sustainability. The identified unique features, advantageous themes, interconnection points, and collaborating networks can work as a basis for their integration.