Overview of policy instruments enabling restorative nature-based solutions with business case examples (D3.6)

Small and medium sized cities in Europe and Latin America share a common challenge in implementing nature-based solutions (NBS). Most land is in private hands. In addition smaller cities are not early adopters of NBS and may be too small to grow a market for private providers of NBS. This begs the question: how can municipalities and the public sector more widely enable NBS in the private sector? This report begins to answer this question, targeting public sector policy and planners wanting to enable policies for private sector participation in providing NBS. This includes, for example, professionals in national ministries for environment and planning; municipal planners working on strategies for naturebased solutions (e.g. SUDS), and municipal master planners. Information for the report has been collected through a series of workshops and interviews with planners and businesses within the INTERLACE project.

More specifically, the report provides an overview of policy instrument ‘proposals’ across four categories that could help grown NBS businesses:

• Legislative, regulatory and strategic instruments

• Financial & economic instruments

• Knowledge, communication, innovation instruments

• Agreement-based or cooperative instruments

The report evaluates the emergent policy instrument proposals in terms of their incentive mechanisms for private landowners and business. Similarities and differences as well as policy recommendations by planners and business are also outlined across the six INTERLACE partner cities, as well as indications of some ways forward for policy design and research. The main body of the report provides the reader with relatively short illustrated sections on different perspectives on policy design for renaturing urban areas. It broadens the methodological scope to look also at policies to both discourage loss of nature, as well as encourage restoration across a rural-to-urban landscape that characterizes all of the cities in the project. Short tabular overviews are provided of policy recommendations by planners and business in each city.