Multiple impacts, costs and (co-) benefits from nature-based solutions for urban climate change adaptation

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Maria Salomé Costa
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/29464
• topic: Nature-based solutions; Climate change; Urbanization; Flood damage; Real estate valuation

The on-going and fast-urban development brought along changes in land-use patterns having resulted in a major conversion of natural landscapes into urban ones and a subsequent impermeabilization of surfaces. This came with problems of different dimensions which are expected to be exacerbated by climate change: increased flood risk, “urban heat islands”, increased air pollution and reduced quality of life. Current ‘hard’ engineering solutions to adapt to urban challenges usually require landscape changes, maintenance and depreciate over time. Nature-based solutions came as efficient and eco-friendlier solutions that besides adding value to urban landscape aesthetics can help mitigate and adapt cities to climate-change and urbanization challenges. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the multiple impacts, costs and benefits of NBS implementation, with a specific focus on flood damage and sprawl, gentrification and real estate valuation. To this end, two models of the Systemic Decision Support Tool (SDST) are used to assess the impacts of NBS on flood risk (using InfoWORKS) and sprawl, gentrification and real estate valuation (using SULD). A case study is provided for the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Results show that the implementation of nature-based solutions leads to an increase in real estate values (+6.1 M€/yr) due to upgraded aesthetics and has an impact on flood damages acting on flood mitigation and reducing damage costs (-27.4 k€/yr). Besides its main functions, NBS also show an effect on population distribution patterns – favouring urban densification over urban sprawl processes.