INTEGRATION OF NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS IN URBAN AREAS: EXPLORING EMERGING APPROACHES

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) have assumed an increasingly important role in urban planning. Given their relevant potential in enhancing natural capital at different scales and in providing several Ecosystem Services (ES), they are particularly relevant for climate adaptation and mitigation. By definition, they are multifunctional, as they are assumed to provide at the same time multiple benefits on environmental, social, and economic domains. Despite the increasing fame of NBS, cities are still facing some difficulties in the identification of policies for the implementation of such solutions. Since cities include a complex set of stakeholders, it is necessary to identify flexible schemes that allow engaging them in light of their social, economic, and cultural diversity. Another relevant challenge consists in the assessment and economic valuation of the benefits generated by NBS at the urban scale. An overall and integrated assessment of all the impacts generated by NBS is necessary to fully compute the benefits related to the environmental, economic, and above all social dimensions. The NBS impact assessment is a prerequisite for the definition of policies capable of implementing NBS at the urban scale. This research seeks to analyze and assess methodologies and policy instruments to foster the NBS implementation and management at the urban scale. Such a task requires integrating knowledge from different disciplines (urban planning, natural sciences, economic and social sciences) to include all the elements and the scales involved in NBS planning. The aim is to identify the main drivers for the implementation of NBS, taking into consideration how these infrastructures impact on the social and public value of ES in cities. For this purpose, the thesis investigates i) the assessment methodologies to measure the impacts generated by ES provided by NBS; ii) the approaches to valuate these impacts considering the social, economic, and environmental dimensions and, iii) the instruments that can be adopted to foster the implementation of NBS with a particular focus on Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes (PES).