A nature-based solution can look ideal on a suitability map and still fail on the ground: the soil may be less permeable than assumed, nobody may have a budget to maintain it, or the community may simply not want it. Our new book chapter, published in the Springer volume Greening and Resilience (Urban Sustainability series), tackles this gap between technical planning and local reality in Mediterranean cities, one of the world’s climate-change hotspots.
The work, led by Awais Naeem Sarwar, tested a three-stage framework across the eight demonstration sites of the OurMED project: the Bode catchment (Germany), Júcar–Albufera (Spain), Arborea (Italy), Agia (Crete, Greece), Medjerda (Tunisia), Sebou (Morocco), Mujib (Jordan) and Konya (Turkey). First, a GIS classification describes each catchment by ecosystem, climate, soil and slope. Second, a decision matrix built from the literature matches those conditions with green, blue and hybrid interventions and produces preliminary NbS maps. Third, and decisively, local experts, each with more than ten years of experience, reviewed and annotated the maps in a structured workshop, testing every proposal for technical feasibility, social acceptance and institutional viability.
The workshop changed the maps substantially. About one proposal in three had to be revised: in almost half of these cases the type or scale of the intervention changed, about one in five was relocated, and a third were dropped or replaced. In Konya, a single large water-harvesting basin gave way to many small rain gardens, while lake renaturalisation was set aside because the inflows it needs are largely diverted to agriculture. In the Júcar basin, experts preferred wetlands, a solution they already knew well locally, to floodplain reconnection, accepting slightly lower technical performance in exchange for wider acceptance. Governance came up again and again: missing maintenance budgets, responsibilities split across water, planning and environment departments, and social factors that no map can show.
The lesson is that resilient cities are not designed at a desk: they are built together with the people who live in and look after them. Because the framework is modular and relies only on freely available data, it can be scaled from a neighbourhood to a whole city and transferred to other regions, giving municipalities a practical way to make participatory validation a routine step in climate-adaptation planning. The chapter builds on the NbS selection framework we published in the Journal of Environmental Management and is part of our research on Nature-Based Solutions.
Sarwar, A. N., Caramiello, C., Pugliese, F., Secci, D., Magnabosco de A. Gomes, R., Bal, E., Ceseracciu, C., Avino, A., Daloglu Cetinkaya, I., Copty, N. K., Jomaa, S., & Manfreda, S. (2026). Participatory Validation of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for Enhanced Resilience. In L. Diana et al. (Eds.), Greening and Resilience (Urban Sustainability, pp. 31–45). Springer Nature Singapore.
This research was supported by the OurMED project (PRIMA programme) and the PRIN project CHANCES.