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What does it take to renature cities? An expert-based analysis of barriers and strategies for the implementation of nature-based solutions
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Data will be made available on request.Supplementary data are available online at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479724003712#appsec1 .This paper uses an expert-based methodology to survey the barriers and strategies related to the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS). The ambition of the paper is to offer a bird's eye overview of the difficulties encountered by NBS deployment and ways to overcome them. With a wide participation of 80 experts from COST Action Circular City, we identify barriers specific to 35 pre-defined NBS of the following four categories: Vertical Greening Systems and Green Roofs; Food and Biomass Production; Rainwater Management; and Remediation, Treatment, and Recovery. The research sheds light on how a major interdisciplinary – yet predominantly technically-oriented - community of scientists and practitioners views this important topic. Overall, the most relevant barriers are related to technological complexity, lack of skilled staff and training programs and the lack of awareness that NBS is an option. Our results highlight concerns related to post implementation issues, especially operation and maintenance, which subsequently affect social acceptance. The paper identifies a “chain” effect across barriers, meaning that one barrier can affect the existence or the relevance of other barriers. In terms of strategies, most of them target governance, information, and education aspects, despite the predominantly technical expertise of the participants. The study innovates with respect to state-of-the-art research by showing a fine-grained connection between barriers, strategies and individual NBS and categories, a level of detail which is not encountered in any other study to date.The work was carried out within the COST Action CA17133 Circular City (“Implementing nature-based solutions for creating a resourceful circular city” (http://www.circularcity.eu), funded within the EU Horizon Programmes and duration 22 October 2018–21 April 2023). Hence, the authors are grateful for the support and would like to acknowledge all participants of the Circular City workshops that contributed during the discussions on barriers and strategies for Nature-Based Solutions implementation at the workshops in February and March 2021. Joana A.C. Castellar (FJC2021-047232-I) and Lucia Alexandra Popartan (FJC2021-047857-I) acknowledge the support from Juan de la Cierva Formación grants financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR. Joana A.C. Castellar and Joaquim Comas acknowledge EdiCitNet project (grant agreement 776665) and Multisource project (grant agreement 101003527), both from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research Program. The authors would like to thank the Government of Catalonia through Consolidated Research Groups 2021 SGR 01283 (ICRA) and 2021-SGR-01352 (LEQUIA). The ICRA researchers wish to express their thanks for funding from the CERCA programme/Government of Catalonia. Lucia Alexandra Popartan acknowledges the support of project Clepsidra (Ref: TED2021-131862B–I00) and the Juan de la Cierva 2021 grant, reference FJC2021-047857-I, financed by MICIN/AEI/10,13039501100011033 and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. Finally, the authors would like to thank CRUE-CSIC agreement with Elsevier for the Open Access funding