Beyond assuming co-benefits in Nature-based Solutions: Applying the niche concept for optimizing social and ecological outcomes

Project Information

Niche4NbS

Grant agreement ID: 852633

DOI

10.3030/852633

EC signature date 28 January 2020

Start date 1 June 2020

End date 28 February 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

TECHNION - ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Israel

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Niche4NbS (Beyond assuming co-benefits in Nature-based Solutions: Applying the niche concept for optimizing social and ecological outcomes)

Reporting period: 2023-06-01 to 2024-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Humanity has become predominantly urban, with over 55% of the world’s population residing in cities today and 66% expected by 2050. While cities have become thriving centers of economic growth, innovation and knowledge production, they also generate a myriad of complex environmental and social challenges. Designing sustainable and resilient cities that tackle these issues and can adapt to the changing needs of inhabitants and environmental changes, may well be one of the grandest challenges to humans ahead. One promising way to address this challenge is to adopt Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in the design and management of new and existing urban areas. NbS can be defined as solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience. Yet despite rising interest and deployment of NbS, most research focused on relating a given intervention to a specific outcome. But nature is not a panacea, and interventions that maximize one service can have no influence, or even negatively affect others. To date, there is still a striking lack of empirical evidence on the effectiveness of NbS in generating biodiversity and human health and well-being outcomes, which are often assumed as inevitable by researchers and planners.
The objective of Niche4NbS project is to understand how we can bring nature back in cities in a way that balances ecological and social benefits. This interdisciplinary project combines cutting-edge methods from ecology, environmental psychology, public health and planning to develop and demonstrate a general and widely applicable theory-grounded approach for: (1) understanding the trade-offs and synergies between social and ecological outcomes of NbS and (2) prioritize implementation of NbS that maximize co-benefits. This is achieved by first independently understanding the ecological and social outcomes of NbS and then predict, in a comparable manner, the spatial distribution of NbS outcomes under different urban and socio-economic contexts. This allows to integrate biodiversity and well-being outcomes to understand tradeoffs and synergies, and identify optimal planning scenarios that maximize co-benefits, and support decision-making for better implementation of NbS. Thus, moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to optimize NbS in a given context, to yield greener, more resilient cities, with happier people and reduced inequalities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Niche4NbS consists of four tasks and according to the workplan the first period is dedicated to Tasks 1 & 2 aiming to explore the ecological and social impacts of Nature-based Solutions (NbS). This research already yielded five papers (three accepted and two under review in leading journals) and it has been presented in several national and international conferences and seminars.

Task 1: we conducted a large systematic urban ecological survey (birds and plants), that covered urban, rural, and natural habitats in the region. This survey exemplified the potential value of urban green spaces for biodiversity conservation on a regional scale, especially in highly human-dominated regions where conservation opportunities are limited (Ventura et al. under review for Landscape and Urban Planning). We also modeled and mapped species distributions and collected valuable data on birds’ movement and home ranges that will be used in the advanced models. Preliminary, results from the models predict that compact urban development is essential to meet biodiversity conservation objectives, shedding important light on how to grow cities sustainably.

Task 2: we showed that the relationship between biodiversity and well-being is more complex than commonly argued and that nature relatedness is an important moderator of this relationship (Shwartz et al. in press for Urban Forestry and Greening). As the project started during the covid-19 pandemic, we used the lockdown setting to run a before/after experiment and demonstrated the direct detrimental impacts of nature deprivation on health and wellbeing, especially for people who live in poor and gray neighborhoods (Colléony et al. 2022 Biological Conservation). Additional study compared two types of NbS (managed garden vs. protected urban nature park) and showed that interactions with nature, related wellbeing benefits, are not equal between the different types (Fleming & Shwartz 2023 People & Nature). Finally, we conducted two experiments in which we explored how NbS influence stress and cognitive abilities. In the first one we used eye-tracking technology, for the first time in this context, to show that exposure to green, flowers and woody plants reduced stress (Fleming et al. under review for People & nature), while the second study showed that the degree of naturalness of NbS did not have any impact on stress and cognitive abilities.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Niche4NbS has shown progress beyond the state of the art in few fronts:

1. Building on the results from the largest systematic urban ecology survey conducted to date, we provide key novel results on the means to design Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in a way that optimizes α-, β- and γ-diversity in urban areas.

2. Using the extensive ecological data and fine-scale species distributions models we tackle one of main debates in urban planning and conservation biology, the land sparing (compact) vs. land sharing (green or sprawl) development. This analysis allows us to robustly predict the impact of different planning scenarios and show that without
sparing land for conservation many species will be extinct from our region by 2050. In the next grant period, we will model how implementation of NbS can reduce ecological impact and help design biodiverse cities and regions and continue to explore the key theoretical and applied questions in urban ecology, such as, the SLOSS hypothesis.
3. We also use the cutting-edge ATLAS technology to collect high resolution (~4 seconds) data on species movement for many species. This information is completely novel in both resolution and scale, and it will be used in the next grant period to improve our models by adding connectivity considerations to our analyses and explore how to
design effective ecological corridors.

4. The use of the novel eye tracing technology has opened new horizons for exploring how NbS of other components of nature or traits influence health and wellbeing. This provides a more mechanistic understanding on how nature provides social benefits and will allow us to model and map for the first time the influence of NbS on mental
health and well-being in the next grant period as planned.

5. In a set of fields studies we already highlighted valuable knowledge about the design of NbS that can enhance wellbeing and our results also demonstrate the importance of connecting people to nature. In the next grant period, we will complete the field nature-dose experiments and expand our work to use virtual reality to explore how to
design NbS to maximize wellbeing benefits.

In the next grant period, we will finish the ecological analysis (task 1) and the running the experimental (task 2) to provide a more mechanistic understanding on how to design NbS that provide ecological and social benefits. Tasks 3&4 will integrate these results to allow for optimization of NbS implementation across a regional scale.

Pictures from NbS experiment 2

Methods & Results from the regional ecological survey

Pictures from NbS experiment 1

Ecological model outputs for three species