Review on Urban Forests and Trees as Nature-Based Solutions over 5 Years

Abstract

As human living environments face increasing challenges with resilience, the concept of nature-based solutions (NBS) was proposed in recent years as a way to promote sustainable living in urban environments. Urban forests and trees play important roles in urban ecosystems, while their potential as an NBS is promising. A bibliometric analysis was first conducted to explore the research pattern of NBS in urban environments. Studies of urban forest and tree-based green infrastructure in NBS research were further investigated using a systematic literature review method. The initial studies on NBS have increased since 2015 with 493 documents published from 142 sources in over 70 countries and regions. Keyword analysis showed green infrastructure had a rather high frequency of utility and received considerable attention. As for urban forests as nature-based solutions (UF-NBS) research, the most prominent study approaches used at different scales and the main benefits and typologies of urban forest studied in the articles were identified. UF-NBS research is still relatively scarce at present. Despite the role of urban forest and trees in addressing environmental challenges being well recognized, UF-NBS studies still need to be conducted in a more comprehensive context, taking social and economic aspects into account.

The evolution and future of research on Nature-based Solutions to address societal challenges

“…Results from our systematic analysis highlight that NbS research (Fig. 1) has primarily focused on climate change and biodiversity loss, aligning with the outcomes of earlier reviews into subsets of the NbS research landscape 40,41 . Since the growth of large-scale research funding programs in 2015, NbS research has begun to focus on other societal challenges.…”

“…This funding increase has led to a substantial body of academic scholarship over the last three decades 1 , which may benefit from systematic and large-scale mapping to identify research trends 32 . To date, previous NbS studies have used a combination of automated machine learning algorithms and desktop reviews to examine the NbS research landscape for specific global issues, including hydrometeorological risk 33,34 , social justice 35 and human wellbeing 36,37 across different contexts [38][39][40][41] and landscapes 42 . However, few reviews have focused on the entire NbS research landscape, particularly the societal challenges that NbS can address 35,39 .…”

A systematic review of urban green space research over the last 30 years: A bibliometric analysis

“…In a study, Kong et al [ 47 ] reviewed the literature on urban forests and trees and used CiteSpace V to map major keywords of nature-based solution research. Manningtyas and Furuya [ 48 ] investigated 56 documents and used VOSviewer for keyword mapping to reveal the distinction between traditional ecological knowledge and ecological wisdom.…”

Impact of urban greening on microclimate and air quality in the urban canopy layer: Identification of knowledge gaps and challenges

“…The scientific database Web of Science Core Collection was chosen in this bibliometric study because it is one of the largest database collections of peer-reviewed journals (Huang and Lu, 2018;Kong et al, 2021).…”