‘Our house is on fire’. Nature-Based Solutions to the test of Urban Heat Island. An experiment and the implications for planning

Abstract

Urban centers cover only 0,51% of the world’s land surface (Schneider et al., 2009), however, their ecological footprint is much larger (Ellis et al., 2010) and it leads to a decrease in biodiversity and an impairment of ecological balance of rural and urban areas, triggering phenomena that undermine the resilience of these systems.
In this paper, Nature Based Solutions are proposed as a fundamental design tool to resist the multiple effects of climate change in the urban context and to mitigate the Urban Heat Island increasing the regulation ecosystem services.
The proposed research shows how the use of NBS, within the urban pattern of a city in the south of Italy, can bring benefits in terms of lowering the temperature and improving the sensation of outdoor thermal comfort of users even in a context highly sensitive to temperature raising phenomena (C3S, ECMWF, 2019). This experimentation also leads to reflect on the need to introduce ecosystem-based approaches within territorial governance programs, starting with the recognition of the main innovations and inertia regarding local and sector planning tools.