Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Water Management

Water plays an essential role in the development and functioning of a city, but could also be a key risk factor for urban pluvial flooding, which may occur more frequently in the context of future climate change. The traditional means of flood risk management relied heavily on engineering measures, or the use of “gray” infrastructure. Recently, there has been a call to integrate nature-based solutions (NBS), which make use of natural processes and ecosystem services, with conventional engineering approaches. NBS infrastructures and designs pay great attention to ecosystem services considerations in assessing their induced hydrological processes, as well as in managing the stormwater and mitigating urban flood and droughts. Nevertheless, compared with grey infrastructure, larger space could be demanded for NBS, while the buffer effect for NBS in extremes events is still uncertain for evaluation.

Moreover, practical access to NBS is vital for adaptations in regional climate, urban design, and the enhancement of ecological/social-economic services, as well as applications in urban water quantity/quality management. For achieving the goal of building resilient communities and cities, it is essential to bridge the system scale gap between urban hydro-dynamic research and NBS; to extend the prevalent method in cost-benefit analysis; and to develop new approaches to balancing competing interests under multiple criteria and the combinations of gray and green measures. For example, degraded urban river and lake systems require nature-based solutions, with stepwise ecological restorations that include environmental remediation, ecological rehabilitation, and natural restoration for different levels of ecosystems degradation.

To encourage more exploration in this area, this Research Topic is proposed to provide a platform for researchers to address the following topics:

Scientific principles of nature-based solutions:
-System scale gaps between urban hydrology systems and nature-based solutions
-Standardization of performance evaluation of natural-based solution
-Cost-benefits of nature-based solutions

Applications:
-Natural-based urban stormwater water management
-Natural-based urban water quality management strategies and methods

Social aspects:
-Natural-based solutions for socio-economic services in urban areas
-Natural-based solutions in city planning and design, and policies making

Methodology, techniques, and case studies:
-Big data, remote sensing, crowd monitoring, data science applications for natural based solutions in urban areas
-Predictive modelling for natural based solutions in urban areas
-Design protocols of natural based solutions in increasing urbanization context
-Methods and techniques for stepwise ecological restoration

Photo credit: Junguo Liu

Keywords: green infrastructure, rainwater, water resources, human-natural systems, urban water

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.