Unlocking Nature-Based Solutions. Tackling heat and water stress in Indian cities. RMI August 28, 2025 Shreya Nath, Namitha Nayak, Mrinal Shrivastava, Akhil Singhal Additional Contributors: Kaylea Brase Menon, Tarun Garg, Anam Husain Prabal Muttoo, Radhika Sundaresan Context...... Indian cities are experiencing heightened stress from extreme summer heat and increased flooding during monsoons. Rapid and often unplanned urban expansion has transformed natural landscapes into dense built-up areas, intensifying the urban heat island effect, water scarcity, and flood risks. Addressing these converging climate and development pressures requires a systems-level, locally grounded approach. Nature-based solutions (NbS) — including integrated blue-green-gray infrastructure (BGGI) — offer a strategic alternative to conventional gray urban development. While their benefits are increasingly acknowledged, the pathways for mainstreaming NbS in Indian cities remain unclear, fragmented, and uncoordinated. To address this, WELL Labs and RMI convened a multi-stakeholder workshop that brought together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and private-sector actors working across water, biodiversity, planning, design, and governance domains. The goal was to identify barriers to NbS adoption and co-develop actionable, context-sensitive solutions across the building, neighborhood, and city scales.
Objectives of the Workshop....
Understanding the barriers: Identify barriers hindering the adoption of blue-green-gray infrastructure in urban spaces.
Policy, governance, and finance and incentives barriers: Challenges to integrating solutions into urban development plans, climate action plans, heat action plans, etc.
Challenges from the design and implementation perspective
Challenges that hinder community acceptance as well as effective operations and maintenance
Mapping solutions and levers: Determine key levers to unlock blue-green-gray infrastructure at the building, neighborhood, and city scales and move toward implementing the solutions from a multi-stakeholder perspective.
Identifying resources to execute solutions: Explore innovative models for promoting collective action for implementation and the operation and maintenance of blue-green-gray infrastructure and passive cooling solutions.
Analysis and Synthesis.....This document presents a detailed overview of those deliberations. The core output is a structured table that maps..........
On-ground problems and lived implementation challenges
The underlying systemic barriers impeding uptake
Practical and policy-relevant actions designed to address those barriers
Descriptions of the interventions needed to operationalize those actions
Key Insights from the Workshop
Many challenges such as poor uptake, weak maintenance, or low community support are symptoms of deeper misalignments between governance, financing, and implementation systems.
Localized approaches are essential, given that effectiveness of NbS depends heavily on urban morphology, climate zones, hydrology, and socio-spatial density.
Critical enablers include data accessibility, performance-linked financing, ecosystem valuation, updated codes and bylaws, and life-cycle accountability......read on- extensive indepth coverage on this issue https://rmi.org/unlocking-nature-based-solutions/