Mainstream Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Climate Resilience

Abstract

Global urbanization over the last century has concentrated people, infrastructure, and economic activity in cities, pushing them to the front lines of damaging impacts of climate change and other social and economic shocks, including COVID-19. Extreme natural disasters in the last 3 years, such as Typhoon Mangkhut (in 2018) in the Philippines, Hurricane Maria (in 2017) and Florence (in 2018) in the United States, the reoccurring extreme floods in Jakarta, and droughts and fires in California and several regions in Australia (in 2020), are expected to become regular occurrences as climate change accelerates. Cities are already vulnerable to such extremes and may become the most severely threatened global locations, given the projections of continued urban expansion that further concentrates people in high-density locations, including in low-elevation coastal zones. With US$90 trillion expected to be invested in infrastructure (IDB 2017), these new buildings, roads, rail lines, electrical grids, and other critical.