Innovating Urban Systems Through Nature-Based Solution for a Circular Economy Enhancement: A General Framework

Cities and communities are worldwide facing several issues and challenges related to global issues concerning climate change, as well as local conditions. Urban systems are the core and the key elements to pursue the transition to a more sustainable, resilient, and circular development. For this purpose, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) are currently encouraged as technologies and strategies to support cities and communities in their transition towards sustainable and resilient development. Moreover, NBS have been recently coupled with the objective and challenges of implementing the Circular Economy (CE) paradigm in urban systems. Therefore, this article explores the relationship between NBS and CE paradigm implementation in urban systems, to highlight if this topic is discussed in literature, as well as if the evaluation of NBS with CE perspective is explored. For this purpose, this study analyses the main NBS catalogues and frameworks. The performed analysis recognizes some lacks and criticalities according to these aspects. Therefore, this research proposes a framework to collect NBS according to the scale of implementations and to provide suitable evaluation tools to assess the generated multidimensional impacts with a CE perspective. The operating principle of this framework is illustrated with a focus on urban agriculture, which has been selected according to its emblematic role in implementing the CE paradigm in urban systems. Moreover, the potentiality of the proposed framework has been discussed, highlighting the possible practical implications for practitioners and Decision Makers (DMs).