Search for: All records

Land-use land-cover (LULC) changes are occurring rapidly in Southeast Asia (SEA), generally associated with population growth, economic development and competing demands for land. Land cover change is one of the vital factors affecting carbon dynamics and emissions. SEA is an important region to study urban-caused LULC emissions and the potential for nature-based solutions (NBS) and nature climate solutions (NCS), as it is home to nearly 15% of the world’s tropical forests and has some of the world’s fastest rates of urban growth. We present a fine-scale urban cluster level assessment for SEA of current (2015) and future (2050) scenarios for carbon sequestration service and climate mitigation potential. We identified 956 urban clusters distributed across 11 countries of SEA. Considering the urban expansion projected and decline in forests, this region could see a carbon loss of up to 0.11 Gigatonnes (Scenario SSP4 RCP 3.4). Comparing carbon change values to urban emissions, we found that the average offset value ranging from −2% (Scenario SSP1 RCP 2.6) to −21%. We also found that a few medium and large urban clusters could add to more than double the existing carbon emissions in 2050 in the SSP3 and SSP4 RCP 3.4 scenarios, while a minority of clusters could offset their emissions under SSP1. Our study confirms that NCS, and particularly reforestation, are in many cases able to offset the direct emissions from land cover conversion from SEA urban clusters. Hence, documenting the plausible LULC transitions and the associated impacts gains significance in the SEA region as the results can be useful for informing policy and sustainable land management.

This article delves into the participatory aspects of the implementation of nature-based solutions (NbS) in the Global South. It examines the practices of community engagement in several projects conducted in informal settlements and how they relate to project visions. Building on previous work on community engagement for urban upgrading projects, we examine the relationship between the methods used to engage communities and the goals that guide the design and implementation of NbS. In doing so, we explore engagement practices that can support the emergence of transformative approaches in historically disadvantaged areas. We discuss how the degree of participation offered by different methods, such as citizen science and serious games, can substantially influence the outcomes of NbS projects by making them more integrated and site-specific. We conclude by discussing how the transformative implementation of NbS entails a multi-stakeholder proactive approach that is capable of supporting changes in the socio-ecological systems.

Nature‐based solutions (NBS) are an increasingly popular approach to water resources management, with a growing number of projects designed to take advantage of landscape effects on water flow. As NBS for water are developed, producing hydrologic information to inform decisions often requires substantial investment in data acquisition and modeling; for this effort to be worthwhile, the information generated must be useful and used. We apply an evaluation framework of salience (type of information), credibility (quality of information), and legitimacy (trustworthiness of information) to assess how hydrologic modeling outputs have been used in NBS projects by three types of decision makers: advocates, implementers, and analysts. Our findings, based on documents and interviews with watershed management programs in South America currently implementing NBS, consider how hydrologic modeling supports two types of decisions for NBS projects: quantifying the hydrologic impact of potential and existing NBS and prioritizing where NBS might be sited within a watershed. To help inform future modeling studies, we identify several problematic assumptions that analysts may make about the credibility of modeled outputs for NBS when advocates and implementers are not effectively engaged. We find that salient, credible, and legitimate results in applications evaluating NBS for water are not always generated in the absence of clear communication and engagement. Integr Environ Assess Manag2022;18:135–147. © 2021 The Authors.Integrated Environmental Assessment and Managementpublished by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).