The effective design, performance, and sustainability of NbS over different scales of space and time is an area with significant margins for improvement:
- Planning NbS across geographical scales, from local/small-scale NbS to embedding NbS within landscape, regional or national management plans, either individually or as networks, as well as understanding NbS interdependence and performance at these different scales, remain pressing questions underpinning challenges for replication and upscaling of NbS.
- The sustainability of NbS and their performance over time and in the face of global change is also an area of significant unknowns, both in terms of the long-term delivery of benefits by NbS as well as the costs of NbS over time. The resilience of biodiversity, ecosystem functions and implemented NbS actions to slow on-set events or pressures such as climate change, land-use change or invasions by non-native species is an area in need of further investigation.
- Understanding and planning NbS across different socio-ecological contexts, including traditional rural systems, is also an area for improvement of knowledge, whether it be analysing more systematically varying contexts when looking at NbS performance, or exploring different solutions for different contexts, including what NbS are suited for, ranging from e.g., dense urban environments to rural environments used for pastoralism and agriculture.
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