Abstract
In the last five years, European research and innovation programmes have prioritised the development of online catalogues and tools (handbooks, models, etc.) to facilitate the implementation and monitoring of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). However, only a few catalogues and toolkits within European programmes are directly related to mainstreaming of NBS for food production (i.e., edible NBS). Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to present existing NBS tools through the eyes of productive urban landscapes. We reviewed 32 projects related to NBS and 50 tools were identified and characterised. Then, the six tools already available and provided indicators were further analysed in terms of their format and knowledge domains. Our main conclusion demonstrates that there is a lack of tools capable of supporting users for planning and implementing edible NBS; calculating the food potential of a city and/or of individual edible NBS, including the needed resources for implementation and operation (water, nutrients, energy); and assessing their urban design value, environmental and socio-economic impacts. Moreover, when they do exist, there is a resistance to share the models and equations behind the tools to allow other projects to reuse or validate them, a fact which is contrary to the open science principles upheld by many public research agencies.
Highlights
By 2050, 68% of the global population is projected to live in cities [1], highlighting the relevance of urban ecosystem services to support the quality of liveable urban spaces, and local food provision and resilient urban food systems [2]
The reviewed projects were selected using the Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) projects database elaborated under the scope of Cost Action Circular Cities (CA17133) [29], which was extended to other projects related to edible NBS identified by the partners of the EdiCitNet project (EU H2020 project GA 776665)
To facilitate the transition towards more edible and resilient cities, such tools should be able to calculate the food potential of a city and/or of individual edible NBS, include the needed resources for implementation and operation, estimate how edible NBS are related to other urban sectors, such as urban water management and energy sectors, and assess their environmental and socio-economic impacts
Summary
By 2050, 68% of the global population is projected to live in cities [1], highlighting the relevance of urban ecosystem services to support the quality of liveable urban spaces, and local food provision and resilient urban food systems [2]. At the urban planning scale, key examples of such concepts are green infrastructure [3,4,5] and multifunctional landscapes [6,7]. These concepts have been put forward by different disciplines, such as planning, landscape architecture, ecology, biology, forestry, and transportation, and due to their novelty, their definitions are still evolving [8].
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