credits: arcadesign
As one of LAND’s key research areas, we explore how distributed, citizen-led Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can be enabled and integrated into urban planning to enhance climate resilience. Urban areas face intensifying pressures from flooding, heatwaves, air pollution and biodiversity loss. While large-scale, state-led NbS, such as park corridors or river restoration, have gained traction, they often overlook the transformative potential of micro-scale interventions on rooftops, courtyards and other private or semi-public spaces.
These micro-scale NbS, like green roofs, permeable pavements and rain gardens, are highly replicable, socially embedded and context-responsive. When aggregated, they can deliver substantial co-benefits for cities. Yet, despite growing policy interest in co-created climate action (e.g., under the EU Green Deal and the UN Sendai Framework), such initiatives remain marginal in planning systems due to fragmented governance, weak incentives and lack of recognition of their cumulative value.
Credits: thegardener
As part of our research, we investigate how cities can incentivize and optimize these micro-scale interventions. Our research addresses the following core questions:
- What institutional and planning arrangements enable citizen-led NbS at the micro-scale?
- How do different financial and behavioural incentive models affect citizen uptake and participation?
- What cumulative benefits, such as stormwater reduction, emerge when micro-scale NbS are scaled across neighbourhoods?
- How can decision-support frameworks better reflect not just ecological performance, but also social acceptability and institutional feasibility?
Our work combines governance analysis, behavioural survey experiments, expert-based Delphi processes and spatial scenario modeling. This interdisciplinary, multi-method approach allows us to understand both systemic barriers and enabling conditions to promoting NbS uptake among the citizenry. A key outcome is the development of a decision-support framework tailored to micro-scale NbS that cities can use to guide equitable, ecologically effective and context-sensitive planning. Ultimately, the overarching aim is to produce actionable knowledge that supports municipalities in unlocking citizen-driven climate action while advancing research on distributed resilience strategies. In bridging fragmented governance with on-the-ground potential, this research area of LAND contributes to a more inclusive and effective urban transition toward climate resilience.