Engineering nature-based solutions: examining the barriers to effective intervention

A growing body of research is examining how nature-based solutions (NBS) are offering planners, politicians and engineers options to promote responses to a wide range of biophysical and socio-economic problems. However, despite the increasing popularity of NBS, there is limited analysis available on how these ‘solutions’ align with urban problems, at what scale they are most effective and what costs are associated with investment in urban nature. This paper analyses current approaches to urban sustainability through an examination of the EU Horizon 2020-funded project Urban GreenUP, in Liverpool (UK), to deconstruct how rhetoric translates to practical applications of NBS interventions. It interrogates the interactions of projects, policies and political buy-in for NBS and argues that an integrated understanding of scale, function and location is needed to successfully address issues of urban climate change vulnerability. This is contextualised against the wider discussions of NBS associated with other EU-funded projects. It concludes that although investment in NBS offers a useful approach to development, they cannot overcome existing barriers to investment in environmental improvements without attention to the same barriers that have always existed. Moreover, the paper argues that the promotion of NBS as solutions to problems is effective only when the problems are transparently and collaboratively defined.