Nature-Based Solutions : A Review of Existing Catalogs and a Proposal for an Integrated Classification And Information Management

The ambition of the European Union to position itself as leader in innovating with nature-based solutions (NBS) to achieve more sustainable and resilient cities has been matched with intense funding rounds in the Horizon 2020 framework programme. NBS research projects have produced so far various catalogs in an attempt to collect and communicate information on NBS and to stimulate their appropriation in landscape/urban design, planning, management and policy making. Peer reviewed discussions of these data pools are just emerging. In this paper these and other significant catalogs are compared systematically at five levels of detail, from NBS categorization to data organization. For each level, comparative analysis and data integration are followed by recommendations in order to arrive at the objective of this paper, an integrated framework for the classification and representation of an NBS catalog. The proposed structure then followed to create an NBS database which includes data from various catalogs. Similarities in catalogs allow to construct an integrated framework for the categorization and classification of NBS and propose a hierarchic challenge-to-indicator structure. Further recommendations based on comparative analysis involve the representation in datasheets. Finally, a method for storing and referencing data is presented, which allows catalogs to be at the same time universal and locally specific. Even though the concept of NBS catalogs is still in a very early stage, the early project outputs allow to identify a unifying framework found in earlier catalogs and theoretical works, as well as lessons to be learned from the pioneering projects