Abstract
The Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) concept is the most recent entry to discussions around how “nature” can be mobilized to render urban areas more resilient to the threat of climate change. The concept has been championed by the European Commission (EC) as a tool that can transform contemporary environmental, social and economic challenges into opportunities for innovation, bolstering Europe's position as a leader in climate change mitigation and adaptation. With its current research and innovation programme—Horizon 2020—the EC looks to position itself as the global NBS frontrunner, providing funding to cities to act as NBS demonstrator projects across the continent. These are expected to provide best-practice examples that can be replicated globally. This paper focuses on three Horizon 2020-funded NBS demonstrator projects: Connecting Nature, URBAN GreenUP and Grow Green, each of which brings together a suite of urban partners from both within and outside the European Union (EU). It examines the internal “politics” i.e., the aims and internal governance and implementation issues associated with these projects, and analyses how partners perceive the NBS concept. To engage with these aims, interviews were conducted with a diverse set of NBS “practitioners” working within the three projects. Analysis showed that the projects aim to influence climate-change resilient and sustainable urbanism through the process of retrofitting cities with small-scale green and blue interventions, as well as help the EU secure stronger diplomatic relations with neighboring non-EU countries and key international trade partners. It also illustrated that for many project partners, NBS is perceived to be a novel concept, because it re-frames pre-existing terms such as Green and Blue Infrastructure (GBI) and Ecosystem Services (ES) in a way that makes principles of urban greening more understandable to lay audiences and more politically palatable for urban governments. However, partners also warn that this framing of NBS has led to a narrow and idealized representation of nature; one that simultaneously undervalues biodiversity and oversells the capacity of natural processes to provide “solutions” to urban climate vulnerability and broader patterns of unsustainable urbanism.
Highlights
During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, urban planners and designers including Ebenezer Howard and Frederick Law Olmsted promoted the use of nature as a tool to sanitize the city (Kaika, 2005)
AP2 expressed that, from the outset of Connecting Nature, the project was expected to answer the following questions: “how do we innovate with our cities? How do we retrofit them?” CP3 stated that URBAN GreenUP “is about testing nature-based solutions in urban city areas... a lot of that is about retrofitting green or blue infrastructures because cities obviously are well established; we don’t have large areas of space to put [in] big grand schemes”
Data collected from interviews with Nature-Based Solutions’ (NBS) practitioners within Connecting Nature, URBAN GreenUP and Grow Green illustrated that these projects aim to influence climate-resilient and sustainable urbanism practice through the process of small-scale biogenic infrastructural retrofit
Summary
During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, urban planners and designers including Ebenezer Howard and Frederick Law Olmsted promoted the use of nature as a tool to sanitize the city (Kaika, 2005). Drawing on a ‘romanticized’ view of nature as pristine and inherently good, they proposed using green and blue spaces to simultaneously tackle environmental issues such as pollution, as well as social ills such as high levels of crime Evolving out of these early examples of “urban experimentation” (Caprotti & Cowley, 2017:1422), the concept of ‘Nature-Based Solutions’ (NBS) – defined as “living solutions underpinned by natural processes and structures that are designed to address various environmental challenges while simultaneously providing economic, social and environmental benefits” (Frantzeskaki et al, 2017:67) – has increasingly gained traction in the last decade within discourse surrounding sustainable and climate resilient futures (Mell and Clement, 2019). Due to the relative newness of the concept and its broad scope, definitions of NBS have been vague and divergent (Pauleit et al, 2017) which has hindered its conceptual development and uptake in practice (Cohen-Schacham et al, 2016)
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