Pre-Existing Interventions as NBS Candidates to Address Societal Challenges

Abstract

The nature-based solutions (NBS) concept is an umbrella term that connects and organizes previous concepts from the ’green-concept family’. Therefore, interventions similar to NBS were used for a long time before this term was first introduced. Such pre-existing actions, to be considered as NBS, must meet the Global Standards formulated by the Union for Conservation of Nature Global Standards. One of these standards refers to the challenge-orientation of NBS. The aim of this study was to propose objective criteria that enable the assessment of the challenge-orientation of such interventions. To this end, a set of criteria referring to the seven societal challenges was presented. A Lublin city (Poland) case study was applied in relation to 24 types of interventions. The results showed that all of the analysed pre-existing actions met at least two of the challenges. The actions with the greatest challenge-orientation potential continuity for ecological networks are: protecting surface wetlands, public parks, allotment gardens, restoring waterbodies and maintaining floodplains, and the lowest potential are: creating nesting boxes for bats and insect hotels, installing apiaries and below-ground rainwater collection systems. The analysed interventions responded, to a greater extent, to challenges such as to human health, climate change adaptation and mitigation and ecosystem degradation/biodiversity loss, and, to the least extent, to food security and socioeconomic development Moreover, the study revealed that the scale of the pre-existing intervention type is too general to draw conclusions regarding its challenge-orientation: each piece of the intervention should be assessed separately in relation to the conditions in the local context.