Unlocking Nature-Based Solutions
Photo credit: WELL Labs
Indian cities are experiencing heightened stress from extreme summer heat and increased flooding during monsoons. Rapid and often unplanned urban expansion has transformed natural landscapes into dense built-up areas, intensifying the urban heat island effect, water scarcity, and flood risks. Addressing these converging climate and development pressures requires a systems-level, locally grounded approach.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS)—including integrated blue-green-grey infrastructure (BGGI)—offer a strategic alternative to conventional grey urban development. While their benefits are increasingly acknowledged, the pathways for mainstreaming NbS in Indian cities remain unclear, fragmented, and uncoordinated.
To address this, a multi-stakeholder workshop was convened jointly by WELL Labs and RMI, bringing together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and private-sector actors working across water, biodiversity, planning, design, and governance domains. The goal was to identify barriers to NbS adoption and co-develop actionable, context-sensitive solutions across the building, neighbourhood, and city scales.
This synthesis report presents a detailed overview of the deliberations.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by Oak Foundation.
Authors Namitha Nayak, Mrinal Shrivastava, Akhil Singhal, Radhika Sundaresan, Shreya Nath, Tarun Garg, Anam Husain, Kaylea Brase Menon, Prabal Muttoo
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