Humanity has become predominantly urban, with over 55% of the world’s population residing in cities today and 66% expected by 2050. While cities have become thriving centers of economic growth, innovation and knowledge production, they also generate a myriad of complex environmental and social challenges. Designing sustainable and resilient cities that tackle these issues and can adapt to the changing needs of inhabitants and environmental changes, may well be one of the grandest challenges to humans ahead. One promising way to address this challenge is to adopt Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in the design and management of new and existing urban areas. NbS can be defined as solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience. Yet despite rising interest and deployment of NbS, most research focused on relating a given intervention to a specific outcome. But nature is not a panacea, and interventions that maximize one service can have no influence, or even negatively affect others. To date, there is still a striking lack of empirical evidence on the effectiveness of NbS in generating biodiversity and human health and well-being outcomes, which are often assumed as inevitable by researchers and planners.
The objective of Niche4NbS project is to understand how we can bring nature back in cities in a way that balances ecological and social benefits. This interdisciplinary project combines cutting-edge methods from ecology, environmental psychology, public health and planning to develop and demonstrate a general and widely applicable theory-grounded approach for: (1) understanding the trade-offs and synergies between social and ecological outcomes of NbS and (2) prioritize implementation of NbS that maximize co-benefits. This is achieved by first independently understanding the ecological and social outcomes of NbS and then predict, in a comparable manner, the spatial distribution of NbS outcomes under different urban and socio-economic contexts. This allows to integrate biodiversity and well-being outcomes to understand tradeoffs and synergies, and identify optimal planning scenarios that maximize co-benefits, and support decision-making for better implementation of NbS. Thus, moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to optimize NbS in a given context, to yield greener, more resilient cities, with happier people and reduced inequalities.
