Yeowon Kim

[Open Access] The NATURA Global Roadmap for Urban Nature-based Solutions is the most comprehensive effort to date to assess the state of knowledge and practice of nature-based solutionS (NbS) in cities and urbanized regions around the world. As cities face escalating challenges — from climate change and biodiversity loss to public health crises and social inequities — the need for sustainable, resilient solutions has never been more urgent. NbS offers a powerful, adaptable approach, working with nature to tackle these interconnected issues while enhancing urban livability and ecosystem health. Though NbS are not a panacea, cities around the world are embracing them as a key component of sustainability and resilience investments. The Global Roadmap is the first comprehensive global assessment of urban nature-based solutions, built from seven Regional Assessments spanning Africa, Asia, Oceania, MENA, Europe, US-Canada, and Latin America—alongside a Global Synthesis Report and Summary for Policymakers.By bringing together scientific research, expert insights, and real-world case studies, the Roadmap offers clear, actionable guidance for decision-makers at every level.Its structure highlights the diversity of urban contexts while providing a cohesive global perspective to guide effective, equitable, and sustainable NbS investments for the future.The Global Roadmap draws on the expertise of regional leads, multidisciplinary teams, and global practitioners. From literature reviews and case studies to expert workshops and rigorous peer review, the assessment process ensures the final insights are both grounded in evidence and reflective of real-world practices. The result? A vital resource empowering policymakers, urban planners, researchers, and communities to drive forward nature-based solutions that create greener, more resilient cities for generations to come.

With increasing vulnerability to extreme weather risks like floods, droughts, and heat waves in urban areas, the ability of cities to prepare for and respond to extreme weather events and their adverse impacts is of paramount importance in improving urban climate resilience. Cities seek affordable and effective solutions that deliver ecosystem services, including protection from extreme weather events. Nature-based solutions have become highly desired as an alternative to traditional infrastructure, as they can provide additional, synergistic benefits to human well-being. In this chapter, we discuss how nature-based solutions may help improve urban resilience to climate risks and demonstrate opportunities and barriers to implementing nature-based solutions.

As infrastructure confront rapidly changing environments, there is an immediate need to provide the flexibility to pivot resources and how infrastructures are prioritized. Yet infrastructures are often categorized based on static criticality framings. We describe dynamic criticality as the flexibility to reprioritize infrastructure resources during disturbances. We find that the most important prerequisite for dynamic criticality is organizational adaptive capacity characterized by flexible goals, structures, sensemaking, and strategies. Dynamic capabilities are increasingly important in the Anthropocene, where accelerating conditions, uncertainty, and growing complexity are challenging infrastructures. We review sectors that deployed dynamic management approaches amidst changing disturbances: leadership and organizational change, defense, medicine, manufacturing, and disaster response. We use an inductive thematic analysis to identify key themes and competencies and analyze capabilities that describe dynamic criticality. These competencies drive adaptive capacity and open up the flexibility to pivot what is deemed critical, depending on the particulars of the hazard. We map these competencies to infrastructure systems and describe how infrastructure organizations may build adaptive capacity toward flexible priorities.

In many disciplines, the resilience concept has applied to managing perturbations, challenges, or shocks in the system and designing an adaptive system. In particular, resilient infrastructure systems have been recognized as an alternative to traditional infrastructure, in which the systems are managed to be more reliable against unforeseen and unknown threats in urban areas. Perhaps owing to the malleable and multidisciplinary nature in the concept of resilience, there is no clear-cut standard that measures and characterizes infrastructure resilience nor how to implement the concept in practice for developing urban infrastructure systems. As a result, unavoidable subjective interpretation of the concept by practitioners and decision-makers occurs in the real world. We demonstrate the subjective perspectives on infrastructure resilience by asking practitioners working in governmental institutions within the metropolitan Phoenix area based on their interpretations of resilience, using Q-methodology. We asked practitioners to prioritize 19 key strategies for infrastructure resilience found in literature in three different decision contexts and recognized six discourses by analyzing the shared or discrete views of the practitioners. We conclude that, from the diverse perspectives on infrastructure resilience observed in this study, practitioners’ interpretation of resilience adds value to theoretical resilience concepts found in the literature by revealing why and how different resilience strategies are preferred and applied in practice.

The capacities of our infrastructure systems to respond to volatile, uncertain, and increasingly complex environments are increasingly recognized as vital for resilience. Pervasive across infrastructure literature and discourse are the concepts of centralized, decentralized, and distributed systems, and there appears to be growing interest in how these configurations support or hinder adaptive and transformative capacities towards resilience. There does not appear to be a concerted effort to align how these concepts are used, and what different configurations mean for infrastructure systems. This is problematic because how infrastructure are structured and governed directly affects their capabilities to respond to increasing complexity. We review framings of centralization, decentralization, and distributed (referred to collectively as de/centralization) across infrastructure sectors, revealing incommensurate usage leading to polysemous framings. De/centralized networks are often characterized by proximity to resources, capacity of distribution, volume of product, and number of connections. De/centralization of governance within infrastructure sectors is characterized by the number of actors who hold decision-making power. Notably, governance structures are often overlooked in infrastructure de/centralization literature. Next, we describe how de/centralization concepts are applied to emerging resilient infrastructure theory, identifying conditions under which they support resilience principles. While centralized systems are dominant in practice and decentralized systems are promoted in resilience literature, all three configurations—centralized, decentralized, and distributed—were found to align with resilience capacities in various contexts of stability and instability. Going forward, we recommend a multi-dimensional framing of de/centralization through a network-governance perspective where capabilities to shift between stability and instability are paramount and information is a critical mediator.