Ecological Planning Strategies and Nature-based Solutions in the Context of Climate Change Resilience

In urban contexts, the objective of climate change resilience permeates strategies, plans, and programmes related to different sectors and scales. Addressing this objective through ecological approaches, therefore, requires mainstreaming them into multiple policies and plans at different levels, ensuring coherence between the broader ecological planning strategies and the specific nature-based solutions (NBS) proposed. This chapter examines recent experiences in Trento, Italy, where two EU-funded projects addressed climate resilience through different but complementary planning initiatives: the drafting of an Urban Greening Plan and the preparation of a Masterplan for river restoration. The Urban Greening Plan identified urban heat island and flood risk as key challenges to address through ecological planning. The river restoration project, initially focused on biodiversity and ecosystem health, progressively incorporated NBS aimed at climate change adaptation. We illustrate how ecosystem service knowledge was generated by combining spatially-explicit models at multiple scales. At the urban scale, critical areas were identified by simulating runoff generation during an extreme rainfall event and mapping exposure to extreme heat. At the local scale, a detailed analysis of soil cover and vegetation structure supported the development of detailed models for urban flooding dynamics and heat stress, thereby highlighting priority interventions and their potential benefits. The case study illustrates how the assessment of ecosystem services can support the coordination of ecological planning strategies and NBS across multiple scales and planning processes, thus enhancing climate resilience in urban contexts.