Nature-based solutions simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits by bringing more nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes. The Horizon 2020 Expert Group on ‘Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities’ was established under the 2014 Work Programme for the Societal Challenge “Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials”. For this report, renowned experts engaged in forward-looking reflection on future orientations for EU Research and Innovation for Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities.
An EU Research & Innovation (R&I) agenda on nature-based solutions will enable Europe to become a world leader both in R&I and in the growing market for nature-based solutions. For this, the evidence base for the effectiveness of nature-based solutions needs to be developed and then used to implement solutions.
Transportation mode choices, distances traveled and resulting CO2 emissions are influenced by transport infrastructures. The latter will either lock-in transport patterns in high-emitting modes or accompany low-carbon pathways. At the same time, future mobility demand increase requires rapid build-up of new infrastructures and upgrade of existing ones. Here the authors quantify investments needs for transport infrastructures over time to reach both development and climate objectives in different world regions. Investments needs between world regions are compared and the main factors determining investment needs for each region are analyzed. To do so, the authors build an ensemble of socio-economic scenarios with the integrated assessment model Imaclim-R combining alternatives on model parameters determining mobility patterns. The authors estimate the investments consistent with the passengers and freight transportation trends in the scenarios and identify their main determinants.
The authors study the impact of institutional characteristics of national and supranational regulation on the effectiveness of both types of regulation. The focus is on four institutional dimensions: regulatory capacity, accountability, commitment and fiscal capacity. It is shown how supranational regulation may reduce or worsen the challenges imposed by national institutional weaknesses. The analysis allows an identification of the costs and benefits of supranational regulation in very diversified institutional contexts. It also explains why some desirable changes from a global welfare perspective are unlikely to take place unless the losers of market integration are somehow compensated when national regulation is unlikely to do so as a result of some of its weaknesses.
