NATURA’s “Urban NBS Global Roadmap” aims to build regional Nature-based solutions (NbS) assessments that consolidate the NbS evidence base and illustrate innovative pathways to mainstream NbS. This talk presents the preliminary results from the Asia Roadmap development, including a review of reviews (both regional reviews and Asia-relevant results from global reviews) and a discussion of instructive case studies of NbS implementation. Case studies were selected to address key characteristics of Asian urban systems that promote or hinder the implementation of NbS, such as bioclimatic conditions, governance capacity, rapid urban growth, or the high prevalence of informal settlements. Our results confirm the recent uptake of NbS in Asia, with a few reviews documenting hundreds of academic publications on the topic. The reviews point to the large diversity in climatic conditions, ranging from dry continental climate (e.g., in South Asia) to hot tropical (in East and Southeast Asia) and unique features of the continent such as the rich biodiversity in Southeast Asia and South Asia (e.g., India has 7-8% of the world's recorded species). Subregional trends emerged with regards to socio-political enabling factors and barriers to NbS. For example, Southeast Asian cities’ typically show low governance capacity, in particular in the realm of water management, making the integration of NbS more challenging at the city- and watershed-scale. Reflecting on these findings, we identify key knowledge gaps for future research and discuss best practices through innovative action research projects – in informal settlements and rapidly urbanizing cities – that aim to address these gaps.
