Guidelines for Citizen Engagement and the Co-Creation of Nature-Based Solutions: Living Knowledge in the URBiNAT Project

Milder, wilder, drier: Understanding preferences for urban nature-based solutions in China

Nature-based solutions have gained recognition for their potential to address urban environmental challenges, particularly in rapidly urbanising countries such as China. However, financial and spatial constraints hinder their widespread adoption. Here we explore urban residents' preferences for nature-based solutions targeting stormwater management, urban heat island reduction, and biodiversity support through monetary, time, and space contributions. We carried out three choice experiment surveys with 1536 Chinese respondents, employing three payment vehicles: willingness to pay (WTP), willingness to contribute time (WTCT), and a novel metric, willingness to contribute space (WTCS). The WTCS metric assesses individuals' willingness to voluntarily convert sealed surfaces on private land into greenspace. We found strong preferences for temperature and flooding reduction across all payment vehicles, reflecting substantial challenges of urban heat islands and flooding in China. Additionally, we reveal a preference for moderate greenspace management intensity, highlighting the potential for biodiversity benefits through reduced management intensities. The introduction of the WTCS payment vehicle expands the methodological toolkit for choice experiments and offers a novel approach to assess citizen support for nature-based solutions. These findings have practical implications for designing effective nature-based solutions programs to address urban environmental challenges and meet the preferences of urban residents in China and beyond.

A nature-based solution selection framework: Criteria and processes for addressing hydro-meteorological hazards at open-air laboratories across Europe

Nature-based solutions (NbS) can be beneficial to help human communities build resilience to climate change by managing and mitigating related hydro-meteorological hazards (HMHs). Substantial research has been carried out in the past on the detection and assessment of HMHs and their derived risks. Yet, knowledge on the performance and functioning of NbS to address these hazards is severely lacking. The latter is exacerbated by the lack of practical and viable approaches that would help identify and select NbS for specific problems. The EU-funded OPERANDUM project established seven Open-Air Laboratories (OALs) across Europe to co-develop, test, and generate an evidence base from innovative NbS deployed to address HMHs such as flooding, droughts, landslides, erosion, and eutrophication. Herein, we detail the original approaches that each OAL followed in the process of identifying and selecting NbS for specific hazards with the aim of proposing a novel, generic framework for selecting NbS. We found that the process of selecting NBS was overall complex and context-specific in all the OALs, and it comprised 26 steps distributed across three stages: (i) Problem recognition, (ii) NbS identification, and (iii) NbS selection. We also identified over 20 selection criteria which, in most cases, were shared across OALs and were chiefly related to sustainability aspects. All the identified NbS were related to the regulation of the water cycle, and they were mostly chosen according to three main factors: (i) hazard type, (ii) hazard scale, and (iii) OAL size. We noticed that OALs exposed to landslides and erosion selected NbS capable to manage water budgets within the soil compartment at the local or landscape scale, while OALs exposed to floods, droughts, and eutrophication selected approaches to managing water transport and storage at the catchment scale. We successfully portrayed a synthesis of the stages and steps followed in the OALs' NbS selection process in a framework. The framework, which reflects the experiences of the stakeholders involved, is inclusive and integrated, and it can serve as a basis to inform NbS selection processes whilst facilitating the organisation of diverse stakeholders working towards finding solutions to natural hazards. We animate the future development of the proposed framework by integrating financial viability steps. We also encourage studies looking into the implementation of the proposed framework through quantitative approaches integrating multi-criteria analyses.

Greening Cities, Shaping Cities: Pinpointing Nature-Based Solutions in Cities between Shared Governance and Citizen Participation

The topic of pinpointing Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in the urban context has been cultivating interests lately from different scholars, urban planning practitioners and policymakers [...]