Policy Instruments to Encourage the Adoption of Nature-Based Solutions in Urban Landscapes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The present paper investigates how policy instruments can foster Nature Base Solution adoption by conducting a systematic literature review. The topic presented in this work is really interesting. However, several challenges are required:

I analyze the single sections:

Abstract has inappropriate structure. I suggest to answer the following aspects: - general context - novelty of the work - methodology used (describe briefly the main methods or treatments applied) - main results and related interpretations.

Introduction: This section should briefly place the study in a wide context and emphasize why it is relevant carrying out the analysis. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance. In this perspective, this section is too succinct and fails to effectively point out the relevance of your contribution towards the existing literature.

For example, the authors could better discuss here the types of pressure at urban level which deserve policy attention.

Some literature to look at:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104680

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104991

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2017.12.001

Materials and methods: I found this section very important for the readability of the paper. However, the research methodology seems underdeveloped. Methods should be described in detail. I think the research procedure could be much more clearly described by means of a diagram also highlighting its potential and limit.

Discussions: The discussion of the results is merely descriptive and the obtained evidence is flimsy due to the fact the outcomes are not supported by an adequate discussion in light of scientific literature. I suggest the author for example to discuss the possibility to combine policy instruments.

Literature:

 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.07.012

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.018

Conclusions: Conclusions must also be revised according to the previous comments. In particular, they should discuss practical implications as well as future lines of research. As it stands now, they fail to extract all the juice of your work. 

I hope these comments might help in improving the paper and encourage the authors to move forward.

Author Response

• Abstract has inappropriate structure. I suggest to answer the following aspects: - general context - novelty of the work - methodology used (describe briefly the main methods or treatments applied) - main results and related interpretations.

Response: The abstract has been updated to clarify the methodology and the results of this study as well as to improve its general structure.

• Introduction: This section should briefly place the study in a wide context and emphasize why it is relevant carrying out the analysis. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance. In this perspective, this section is too succinct and fails to effectively point out the relevance of your contribution towards the existing literature.

Response: The introduction was expanded to include more context and justify the literature gap and hence the study relevance and significance.

• For example, the authors could better discuss here the types of pressure at urban level which deserve policy attention. (Some literature to look at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104680; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104991; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2017.12.001)

Response: This information was added- see L.37-L.42.

• Materials and methods: I found this section very important for the readability of the paper. However, the research methodology seems underdeveloped. Methods should be described in detail. I think the research procedure could be much more clearly described by means of a diagram also highlighting its potential and limit.

Response: A methodology diagram was included and the methods were described in a greater detail.  

Response: The discussion was expanded and each result discussed in greater detail with the inclusion of new references. Additionally, L.426-L.435 includes a discussion on the combination of policy instruments.

Response: Conclusion was altered to better represent the discussion and include future lines of research (L.479-L.486).

Reviewer 2 Report

see attachment

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Minor comments:

Response: These errors were corrected and the paper revised.

• In l. 49, you state that: “In general, NBS are considered a better approach to increase cities’ resilience and sustainability than traditional grey solutions.” By whom? For what? I would refrain from using terms that contain value judgments such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and instead state that NBS are increasingly seen as promising solutions or have a lot of potential.

Response: The sentence was altered to remove potential value judgments.  

• 61 “Policies might reflect the current paradigms, and interactions between different policies affect the resulting outcome”. This sentence is unclear – what is meant by outcome?

Response: The sentence was altered and clarified.

• 79 states that “Although NBS are progressively being contemplated and integrated into policy-making and planning guidelines, new governance instruments are needed”. To set the scene and make this sort of statement, more information is needed on why and which new governance instruments are needed. Some suggested references include:

Albert, C., Schröter, B., Haase, D., Brillinger, M., Henze, J., Herrmann, S., ... & Matzdorf, B. (2019). Addressing societal challenges through nature-based solutions: How can landscape planning and governance research contribute?. Landscape and urban planning, 182, 12-21.

Martin, J. G., Scolobig, A., Linnerooth-Bayer, J., Liu, W., & Balsiger, J. (2021). Catalyzing Innovation: Governance Enablers of Nature-Based Solutions. Sustainability, 13(4), 1971.

Frantzeskaki, N., Vandergert, P., Connop, S., Schipper, K., Zwierzchowska, I., Collier, M., & Lodder, M. (2020). Examining the policy needs for implementing nature-based solutions in cities: Findings from city-wide transdisciplinary experiences in Glasgow (UK), Genk (Belgium) and Poznań (Poland). Land Use Policy, 96, 104688.

Ershad Sarabi, S., Han, Q., L Romme, A. G., de Vries, B., & Wendling, L. (2019). Key enablers of and barriers to the uptake and implementation of nature-based solutions in urban settings: A review. Resources, 8(3), 121.

Response: The introduction section was expanded to better accommodate existent literature and justify the significance of this study, see L.81-L.115.

• 85 states that literature superficially addresses policy instruments for NBS. This is not entirely true, more nuance needs to be added here. See:

Davis, M., Abhold, K., Mederake, L., & Knoblauch, D. (2018). Nature-Based solutions in European and national policy frameworks.

In Europe : Davies, C., Chen, W. Y., Sanesi, G., & Lafortezza, R. (2021). The European Union roadmap for implementing nature-based solutions: A review. Environmental Science & Policy, 121, 49-67.

Response: This literature gap was clarified, including new references- see L.120-L.149.

• 122-129: a figure showing the selection process would make more sense here.

Response: A diagram was included to clarify the methodological review process.

• 164: a ‘global case study’ seems contradictory, since by definition a case study is focused on one area, country or place. It is worth explaining what is meant by this.

Response: This was updated and the graph explained in L.256-L.260.

• Graph 3: how are the results in this graph relevant for your research question? What does this tell us about NBS instrument adoption? A few lines should be added to analyse this, or the figure should be removed.

Response: The graphs relevance was included in the methodology section (see L.190-L.203).

•   223: “Congestion tax and transit subsidies to reduce the number of automobiles and encourage the creation of small business for the maintenance of green spaces” – these seem to be 2 unrelated points.

Response: These instruments were divided in two.

• 243 “the acknowledgement of its existence” – the existence of what?

Response: The sentence was clarified.

• “To overcome them, it is important to synthetize the drivers and constraints to implementation” – please see the earlier literature cited which does exactly that: synthesizing enablers and barriers.

Response: The sentence was clarified.

• 247: I disagree. The NBS concept was introduced much earlier than in 2015. For a detailed timeline, see (and many others): Cohen-Shacham, E., Walters, G., Janzen, C., & Maginnis, S. (2016). Nature-based solutions to address global societal challenges. IUCN: Gland, Switzerland, 97.

Response: That error was corrected and the reference added (L.45-L.51).

• 255-257: I would be careful to rephrase this to the state the hard facts and sound less patronizing.

Response: The sentence was updated.

Major comments

• In l.48, you acknowledge that NBS are an umbrella term which encompasses many other concepts. Nevertheless, in their search terms authors only included NBS. This seems slightly contradictory, and it seems you are missing a lot of potentially relevant literature by only including this search term. I would also add a few concepts to the list (e.g. ecosystem-based adaptation, Ecosystem-based approaches, ecosystem-based approaches to Disaster Risk Reduction).

Response: The paragraph was updated to better explain the differences between the concepts to justify why only NBS concept was reviewed (see L.52-L.59). Furthermore, L.185-L.187 in the methodology section include references that follow the same methodology.

• I question the authors’ choice to exclude grey literature. While they explain this choice, I believe that for this type of assessment – looking into on-the-ground policy instruments for NBS – excluding grey literature means missing key findings on hands-on NBS adoption. I am thinking specifically about the many recent H2020 project reports published on the matter, summarized in this recent report by the EEA: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/nature-based-solutions-in-europe. I would reconsider the choice of excluding grey literature, especially in light of your results.

Response: References were added that have the same methodology and to justify the choice not to include grey literature, in order to assure the study credibility and quality. However, several grey literature documents were added to the introduction and discussion part.

• 113: NBS are referred to as a recent concept. Yes, the term NBS is relatively recent. However, the related terms which it encompasses are not. This makes the choice of keywords and the time constraints used in the search questionable. See this article for a timeline of NBS terminology:

Ruangpan, L., Vojinovic, Z., Sabatino, S. D., Leo, L. S., Capobianco, V., Oen, A. M., ... & Lopez-Gunn, E. (2020). Nature-based solutions for hydro-meteorological risk reduction: a state-of-the-art review of the research area. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 20(1), 243-270.

Response: The NBS terminology was removed and more attention to the NBS concept definition and differentiation from the other concepts was given (see L.52-L.59). Additionally, literature was included to encompass the choice of keywords search in this study (See L.166-177). More recent references were added, including grey literature to better expose the literature gap.

• Throughout the manuscript, authors refer to either instruments, policy instruments or planning instruments for NBS. This terminology is used inconsistently, as these terms seem to be used interchangeably, and not defined appropriately. In the introduction, it should be made very clear what each of these refer to exactly. If they refer to the same concept, then authors should stick with one terminology.

Response: Terminology has been standardized throughout the document.

• The article makes the assumption that effective policy instruments are the only solution to mainstreaming NBS. This appears very clearly in line 91 which states “In fact, most authors mention barriers to the implementation of NBS, revealing the importance of policy instruments to increase its success”. While appropriate policy instruments are crucial, and of course the focus of this article, other socio-economic enablers and pre-conditions such as education, political will, value systems and shifting paradigms should not be neglected. Governance is not just government, it goes beyond policy. These should be mentioned somewhere, either in the introduction or the conclusions. Again, see:

Albert, C., Schröter, B., Haase, D., Brillinger, M., Henze, J., Herrmann, S., ... & Matzdorf, B. (2019). Addressing societal challenges through nature-based solutions: How can landscape planning and governance research contribute?. Landscape and urban planning, 182, 12-21.

Martin, J. G., Scolobig, A., Linnerooth-Bayer, J., Liu, W., & Balsiger, J. (2021). Catalyzing Innovation: Governance Enablers of Nature-Based Solutions. Sustainability, 13(4), 1971.

Frantzeskaki, N., Vandergert, P., Connop, S., Schipper, K., Zwierzchowska, I., Collier, M., & Lodder, M. (2020). Examining the policy needs for implementing nature-based solutions in cities: Findings from city-wide transdisciplinary experiences in Glasgow (UK), Genk (Belgium) and Poznań (Poland). Land Use Policy, 96, 104688.

Response: The introduction section was expanded to include this information, see L.90-L.99.

• 100 your 2 research questions are overlapping and seem to answer the same question (Q 1 which instruments encourage NBS adoption? Q 2 what instruments are found in the literature that encourage NBS adoption? – essentially the same question).

Response: The first question was updated to clarify its objective. Hence, the first question (“Which policy instruments are mentioned which have the potential to encourage the adoption of NBS?”) seeks to answer if policy instruments are mentioned in literature and their categorization. The second question (“Does the literature provide specific policy instruments for NBS adoption?”) has the objective to find in literature specific examples of NBS policy instruments. These two questions represent the study division- first in content and bibliometric analysis as policy instruments are mentioned in papers and the second part that list the specific policy instruments found. In addition, this division was clarified throughout the sections.

• Graphs 2-4: In the methods, you only specify 4 main types of instruments (command-and control/planning, economic and information) whereas the results show a much narrower split and new categories. This makes it inconsistent with the terminology announced in the methods. The same is true for Table 1, which uses the term ‘plan/legislative instruments’, introducing yet again a new terminology. Please stay consistent with your instrument categories throughout the article.

Response: The terminology has been updated throughout the document.

• Graph 2: More information is needed on the different policy instrument categories and how these were defined. For example, what is meant by ‘simulation’ or ‘statistical’? A table explaining each category would be easier to understand.

Response: The paragraph introducing the methodologies categories was clarified- see L.241-L.253.

• Graph 2: Conceptual instruments seem to be the main type of instruments in publications. I am not sure that literature reviews and the other tools falling under this category can be qualified as ‘policy instruments’ however. There is a problem in the framework for assessing policy instruments since the methodology of the articles (e.g. ‘conceptual’ category) seems to have been mixed with the policy instruments they report on.

Response: There was an error in Graph 2, which represents methodologies and not instruments. The error was clarified.

• The focus of the article is unclear, since you seem to often refer to NBS adoption in urban areas, but your results span over various scales, including rural areas. E.g. l. 234, l. 29-35. This needs to be focused better. If the article’s scope is urban NBS only, then instruments relating to e.g. agricultural land, as reported in the results, should be excluded (ideally, these articles should be excluded from the literature review altogether).

Response: In fact, NBS are usually regarded in urban contexts, however they can be implemented in urban peripheral areas and still have an impact, depending on the NBS type and objective. This information was included- see L.70-L.72.

• The results stated in l. 252-253 on most articles being theoretical clearly relates to the fact that the authors excluded grey literature. I would therefore not highlight this particular result so much because it might be due to a biased data selection. The same applies to l. 321.

Response: Grey literature was included in the introduction and discussion sections so that their information would still be included and cross-checked with the study results.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have done a great work. Congrats

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx