This guide offers resilience practitioners an overview, practical examples and steps to understand and advocate for nature-based urban resilience solutions.
The opportunity to build and rebuild resilient and healthy communities by taking advantage of natural infrastructure’s many benefits is available to every city.
Nature is essential to how a city functions, providing valuable services including food, water, air quality, climate regulation, flood protection and measurable health and economic benefits. The use of nature-based solutions as infrastructure produces measurable results cities can use to meet specific goals and targets like gallons of storm water filtered, storm surge reduction or heat island mitigation. In short, nature works, and there is a growing body of evidence to demonstrate how it works.
Governments and businesses alike are starting to recognize nature as a critical component of thriving, resilient cities, these considerations are all too often absent from the decisions that planners and policymakers are taking that will ultimately shape the urban landscapes of our cities in the years to come.
We have begun to see successful approaches that do just that – programs and projects that leverage nature and natural infrastructure to build city resilience. From advancing Australia’s first metropolitan urban forest strategy in Melbourne, to valuating the ecosystem services of mangroves and other nature-based solutions in Panama City, cities are committing to defend the global commons as a natural way to build resilience.