Connecting Nature Deliverable 5: Nature-based Solutions Framework for Front-runner cities.

This document presents the Nature-based Solutions Framework developed in the Connecting Nature project to support the planning, delivery, and legacy of nature-based solutions on a large scale in cities. The main aim of the framework is to provide a comprehensive standard that informs urban planning and policy practice to scale up urban resilience, innovation, and empowerment via nature-based solutions in cities. The framework facilitates learning by and for cities on how to generate and connect diverse types of (e.g. technical, market, governance, social) innovations engendered by nature-based solutions. In this way, we generate innovation propositions for science and practice for the large-scale implementation of nature-based solutions and for making Europe a global leader in the innovation and implementation of nature-based solutions.

Our main premise lies in our understanding of nature-based solutions as ‘living’ sustainability transition experiments. A key challenge is large-scale implementation – or ‘up-scaling’ – of nature-based solutions. This includes, for example, the replication or expansion of demonstration projects or the institutional embedding of new knowledge, skills, and collaboration and financing mechanisms. Scaling nature-based solutions is therefore about more than the individual innovations: it is about how they are connected to each other and to their contexts. This requires new types of processes, partnerships, conditions, skills, and knowledge to allow for multi-actor collaboration and synergies, design fit-to-context nature-based solutions that generate multiple benefits, and ensure early assessment of the transformations brought about in cities.

We have co-produced the Nature-based Solutions Framework, its translation to the frontrunner cities, and the derivation of lessons through iterative interaction between researchers and planners of the cities in the Connecting Nature project. This means that we adopted a ‘learning-by-doing’ approach based on science-practice collaboration and cross-disciplinary cooperation. Our aim is to in this way integrate and generate new knowledge and ultimately to translate this knowledge into urban planning and policy frameworks and unlock existing barriers.

This document envelops the reports by the frontrunner cities Genk (Belgium), Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Poznań (Poland), which showcase how the cities made use of the framework to implement their nature-based solutions exemplars. It summarises how the cities’ experiences contribute to (connecting) diverse types of innovations for the large-scale nature-based solutions implementation in cities.