International Effort to Improve Urban Resilience

“We are developing NATURA, which is an international network of networks. I will focus particularly on the international work in Europe, China, Australia and Africa,” McPhearson said. “NATURA, which stands for ‘Nature-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene,’ will link early-career scholars and practitioners who are working on solutions for climate change resilience around the world. We will create opportunities to share knowledge from one region or city with another.” Grimm will lead the North American node, while co-principal investigator Elizabeth Cook of Barnard College will lead the Latin American node.

According to McPhearson, one of the main challenges will be that these networks will have their own goals, challenges and missions. Initially, the team will bring the core networks together to brainstorm where interests and expertise can be aligned. Then, working groups will be created that will be tasked with digging more deeply into specific areas. 

Grimm said much of NATURA’s framework will be focused on merging ecological, social and technological solutions to extreme climate issues. “This framework grew from our work in the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN),” Grimm said. UREx SRN, co-directed by Grimm and ASU sustainability Professor Charles Redman, is the founding network for NATURA.

“Often, nature-based solutions are thought of as being strictly ecological, but they are always going to have technological and social elements,” Grimm said. Additionally, solutions that might work in one part of the world or one part of the country, would not be appropriate for others. “We have different extreme event challenges. For example, here in Arizona, we would think about extreme heat and flooding. In New York, we think about sea-level rise compounded with coastal storms. And how we think about applying nature-based solutions in a massive slum that might have 20% of the population in a large city in Africa, for example, is totally different than adding green infrastructure in Portland, Oregon.”

McPhearson said one of the biggest challenges for implementing nature-based solutions is that climate change is ramping up quickly.

“If nations meet their targets under the Paris Agreement, we are still on track for a much warmer world — potentially 3 degrees Celsius or warmer,” he said. “That poses dramatic and even existential challenges for cities from rising temperatures, sea-level rise and coastal storms, and changing rainfall patterns that produce drought and extreme flooding. Nature-based solutions are not being implemented at the scale of the challenge we face currently, nor the coming future of climate-driven extreme events. It’s critical to advance our scientific understanding of just how effective nature-based solutions may or may not be.”

ASU notes that the NATURA project includes 26 networks across five global regions. The researchers will develop an online database to coordinate information exchange and build the data and informatics for cross-city comparisons. This will be a key tool for both individuals and groups of researchers to contribute to the project.