Living in a world beset by rising sea level, floods in urban and suburban areas, air pollution, and food security risks, it is urgent to mitigate threats by adapting to climate change. In September 2019, the UN Climate Action Summit declared Natural-Based Solutions (NBS) as one of the major action domains, paralleled with Climate Finance and Carbon Pricing, Energy Transition, Industry Transition, Infrastructure, City and Local Action, Resilience and Adaptation, etc. This important approach to fulfilling the Paris Agreement globally could crucially help reduce climate risks and build climate-resilient cities in an economic, efficient, and sustainable way.
Although NBS can be applied at multiple scales to fulfill various goals including economic development and environmental protection, a solution inspired and supported by nature and making use of nature is not a brand new idea. Therefore, research and practices under the NBS framework are expected to look further into fundamental scientific issues including sustainable design, designed ecology, and experimental design through updated solutions and new perspectives. The NBS studies will focus on both the current core agendas of climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and water resilience, and the emerging theoretical research and application in health design for nature, natural education, and spatial governance and ecological preservations/restoration at different scales.
Focusing mainly on urban resilience and sustainable development, climate adaption, and water resilience, this issue will present cutting-edge and studies and practices related to the framework, process, and effects (social and economic benefits) of NBS in various disciplinary fields in China and from abroad, especially the NBS achievements in China’s territorial spatial planning and ecological restoration. These interdisciplinary ideas and practices are expected to inspire urban planners and landscape architecture practitioners.
Author Biography:
YU Kongjian is a Doctor of Design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, is an Honorary Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and professor at the College of Architecture and Landscape at Peking University. YUAN Jia is an associate professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, a research fellow at the Key Laboratory of New Technology for Construction of Cities in Mountain Area at Chongqing University, is a cooperative research fellow of the CAS Key Laboratory of Mountain Ecological Restoration and Bioresource Utilization & Ecological Restoration and Biodiversity Conservation Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province at the Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Eckart LANGE is a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield.
