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This paper explores the institutional mainstreaming of nature-based solutions (NBS) to advance a process-based understanding about how to strategically develop the governance capacities needed for systemic, localised and inclusive NBS. To this end, it reports how policy officers in ten European cities have started to mainstream NBS by interacting with and changing incumbent governance arrangements when experimenting with novel governance processes and mechanisms to plan, deliver and steward NBS. Based on these activities of the policy officers, the analysis identifies three strategies, associated stepping stones and changes in governance conditions, to mainstream NBS in governance capacities: institutionalising (a) a systems’ approach to link NBS to policies, regulations, and departments across goals and sectors, (b) inclusive collaborations for localised and inclusive interventions, and (c) reflexivity and learning about how NBS interact with the (institutional, ecological, social, etc.) contexts and create impacts. The strategies illustrate institutional entrepreneurship in interacting with incumbent governance contexts, and how starting from NBS as a type of systemic innovation can promote broader shifts in urban governance arrangements.

Green roofs have been implemented on new buildings as a tool to mitigate the loss of post-industrial or brownfield land. For this to be successful, the roofs must be designed appropriately; that is with the right growing media, suitable substrate depth, similar vegetation and with a comparable soil microbial community for a healthy rhizosphere. This study compared soil microbial communities (determined using phospholipid fatty acid or PLFA analysis) of two extensive green roofs and two post-industrial sites in Greater London. It was found that green roof rootzones constructed using engineered growing media are not depauperate, but can have an abundant soil microbial community that in some cases may be more diverse and numerous than communities found in brownfield areas. In this preliminary study, one green roof supported abundant soil microbial communities that were dominated by gram negative and aerobic bacteria, whilst fungal abundance was similar across all sites analysed. Furthermore, ratios of fungal: bacterial PLFA’s were larger from post-industrial sites but overall were consistent with bacterial dominated soils typical of early successional habitats.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2050 Vision depicts a world living in harmony with nature where “biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people”. To achieve this vision, alternatives to business-as-usual are urgently needed, especially in the highest impacting sectors. Here we demonstrate the use of visioning and target setting to create an actionable roadmap to a ‘nature positive’ future for the UK residential and commercial development sector. During an online workshop, ten expert participants defined a shared vision for the development sector in 2050, and worked collaboratively to identify interim targets required to achieve that vision. The resulting roadmap highlights the need to improve biodiversity monitoring and assessment methods, strengthen Biodiversity Net Gain metrics, increase ecological literacy and conservation funding, and enhance community access to, and connection with, nature.

Co-creation is becoming a widely used mode of urban governance and research for city-making and city-transitioning being conceptually entangled with experimentation, innovation and collaboration. In this paper, we address three questions to systematize knowledge about and advancing the research and practice of co-creation: Why co-create? How to co-create? With whom to co-create? We first present three distinct premises of co-creation that respond to the question of why to co-create, and mark advantages of co-creation in comparison to participatory processes: bridging and weaving knowledge for place-based urban transitions, emancipating urban policy and planning, and advancing research to transformative and transdisciplinary approaches that are socially relevant. We then present key practices and skills required for engaging in and organizing co-creation processes (i.e., how to co-create). Next to advocacy, communication, leadership, and organizational skills, we identify that creativity, playfulness, emotional intelligence, receptivity, and collaborative learning are important, yet often overlooked, skills and capabilities for co-creation. Finally, we investigate the politics of co-creation through the lens who is included in co-creation and how (i.e., with whom to co-create). We discuss future research on co-creation and its applications centered on measuring its impact against its premises while recognizing the importance of having different metrics and reflexive measures that can evaluate its deep impact and its relation to urban transitions. Science Highlights • Co-creation is a key epistemological foundation for the new urban science or science of cities. • Co-creation is a novel form of governance that supports evidence-based policy making in gearing up innovative pathways for urban transitions. • Co-creation requires careful research design, practice and organization.

Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) represent an opportunity to use stormwater management as a mechanism to deliver multiple co-benefits. They can play a key role in urban climate change adaptation, restoring nature, and increasing health and social wellbeing. Despite these benefits, their uptake is limited with many practitioners reporting barriers to implementation. To explore these barriers, and to define actions to unlock scaling, our mixed-methods study explored comparative perceptions of SuDS practitioners within the UK. Survey research (n = 48) provided an overview of broad experiences across a range of SuDS practitioners. Main barriers described were access to funds, difficulty retrofitting, cost to maintain, and the ownership of SuDS. Main issues having the least available information to support SuDS scaling were conflicts with corporate identity, cost to maintain, and collaboration between various stakeholders. Follow-up interviews (n = 6) explored experiences among a contrasting subset of survey respondents: those who experienced the highest number of perceived barriers and those who experienced the fewest barriers to SuDS implementation. From these interviews, key themes were identified that categorized the barriers for SuDS implementations: people-related elements; limiting practicalities; and informational factors. The findings were differentiated between indirect barriers (i.e., soft barriers, such as individual practitioner knowledge and capacity gaps linked to poor knowledge exchange) and direct barriers (i.e., hard barriers including specific gaps in SuDS data and knowledge experienced more universally). The importance of differentiating between knowledge-based (indirect) barriers that can be unlocked by improved information-transfer solutions and actual (direct) barriers that need further considered approaches and the generation of new knowledge to overcome is highlighted. Evidence-based policy recommendations for governmental and SuDS-based organisations are presented.

In the UK, SMEs account for 99.9% of the business population, with from 43% to 53% of UK business emissions coming from SMEs. However, SMEs face specific barriers in relation to net zero targets, such as a lack of knowledge about strategies to achieve net zero targets. Despite the ongoing lack of a formal decarbonisation plan for SMEs, various types of projects have been designed to help SMEs to move towards the UK’s net zero target. The Eastern New Energy (ENE) project received funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) to support SMEs across significant economic areas of the UK, namely the East of England, to help address the barriers that prevent SMEs from decarbonising. The project provided a range of measures, including raising their level of knowledge and providing technical support to help with SME decarbonisation. Following the completion of our targeted support activities, semi-structured interviews (n = 21) were conducted with SME beneficiaries to evaluate the effectiveness of the support with the ambition of providing some policy recommendations based on understanding how national and strategic support can be effective for a diverse, often unconnected ecosystem of businesses. The findings from the interviews indicated that engagement in the ENE project had positive impacts on the SMEs’ understanding of net zero, or how to start their journey towards decarbonisation by identifying their source of emissions and learning how to calculate them. However, accounting for emissions from Scope 3 activities, transition costs and building restrictions were the main barriers that undermined the ENE recommendations. Our research concludes that in designing engagement projects and support, one needs to acknowledge such restrictions and barriers, which requires government interventions to cover all aspects of the SME decarbonisation journey, from nuanced and responsive policy making to developing bespoke knowledge transfer and supporting low-carbon material provision that can support a decarbonised marketplace.

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local‐scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – www.predicts.org.uk). We make site‐level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015. The collation of biodiversity datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents is necessary to understand historical declines and to project – and hopefully avert – future declines. We describe a newly collated database of more than 1.6 million biodiversity measurements from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local‐scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world.

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)-has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in Ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity.

Source at https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2579 .