Beyond Assuming Co-Benefits in Nature-Based Solutions: A Human-Centered Approach to Optimize Social and Ecological Outcomes for Advancing Sustainable Urban Planning

Abstract

Urbanization deletes and degrades natural ecosystems, threatens biodiversity, and alienates people from the experience of nature. Nature-based solutions (NbS) that are inspired and supported by nature have the potential to deliver multifunctional environmental and social benefits to address these challenges in urban areas under context-specific conditions. NbS implementation often relies on a one-size-fits-all approach, although interventions that maximize one benefit (e.g., biodiversity conservation) may have no influence on, or even negatively affect, others (e.g., social justice). Furthermore, the current pathways from NbS to various benefits do not rely on a deep understanding of the underlying processes, prohibiting the identification of optimal solutions that maximize synergies across pathways. We present a comprehensive socio-ecological framework that addresses these issues by recognizing that cities are human-dominated environments that are foremost built and maintained to support humans. Our framework demonstrates how we can use experiments and niche species models to understand and predict where species will be and where people will be healthy and happy in a comparable manner. This knowledge can then be integrated into decision support tools that use optimization algorithms to understand trade-offs, identify synergies, and provide planners with the tools needed to tailor context-specific NbS to yield greener, more resilient cities with happier people and reduced inequality.

Planning nature-based solutions: Principles, steps, and insights

“…Place-specificity is essential, as both societal challenges and potential NBS are always context specific. NBS tend to be bound to a specific place (Albert et al 2019;Colléony and Shwartz 2019;Young et al 2019) so that planning with NBS needs to adapt general solutions to local conditions and challenges to ensure resource efficiency and resilience to change (European Commission 2015; Narayan et al 2015;Raymond et al 2017;Dorst et al 2019). Failing to consider local conditions may cause negative effects (Guerrero et al 2018), and mismatches between a particular action and the socio-spatial context might imply that the envisaged NBS no longer qualifies as a 'solution' (Young et al 2019).…”

Adaptation to Climate Change: Does Traditional Ecological Knowledge Hold the Key?

“…In an attempt to address this knowledge gap, we have developed a framework based on TEK components, resilience theory and socio-ecological frameworks to explore communities' adaptation to climate change in coupled socio-ecological systems (Figure 1). To develop human-centric adaptation solutions on the basis of sustainable ecosystem management, it is crucial to understand the relationship between humans and the biophysical sphere [19]. Socio-ecological systems are an interplay between humans and the biophysical environment which is increasingly recognised as a tool for conceptualising human-environment systems and developing methods of governance that enhance resilience [20,21].…”

Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Urban Development

“…This Special Issue covers a broad geographical range, with contributions from Africa [17], Asia [18][19][20], Australia [21,22], Europe [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] and North America [31][32][33]. It explores a range of ecosystems in the urban realm, spans natural remnants such as forests [30,32], wetlands [18,21], and natural grasslands [17,22], traditional urban greenspaces including cemeteries [33], gardens [29,31], and, finally, novel urban ecosystems such as green roofs and constructed wetlands [20,26], built-up areas [23], railway bridges [24] and emerging forests on vacant land [27].…”

“…Several papers explore biodiversity in relation to diverse features of urban environments and address a range of animal groups [21,24,27,31,33] and plants [17,18,20,22,27,30,32], including some multi-taxa studies [24,26,27]. Other papers explicitly address urban environments as socio-ecological systems [19,22,25], or further methodological approaches in understanding the people-nature intersection in cities [23,28,29]. Our selection of papers address four current topics in urban ecological research: pressures on biodiversity in cities, opportunities for biodiversity in cities, biodiversity as a component of socio-ecological systems, and new methodological approaches to urban biodiversity conservation and sustainable urban development ( Figure 1).…”

“…However, the mechanisms underpinning these benefits, and the interactions between the different pathways are poorly understood. Colléony and Shwartz [19] introduce a social-ecological framework that integrates co-benefits to optimize social, environmental and ecological outcomes for urban planning. This framework identifies how experiments and modelling can be used to better understand mechanisms and the synergies and tradeoffs between different benefits.…”