NBS model concept

City Blues project has set an ambition to develop a Joint Operational Model (JOM) for the development of Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for resilient urban watersheds. This needs to serve as guidance source for local governments, infrastructure and public service providers to help select suitable strategies in implementing NBS. As the initial idea the JOM aimed to cover themes like planning of NBS, risk management, maintenance plans, citizen and stakeholder engagement, governance models and actual pilots and be visualized as a process chart.

To proceed with the development of the JOM it needs to be acknowledged that all 5 pilot cities participating in the project differ by their previous experiences with climate extremes, their entry level capacities and knowledge pool on NBS, their financial capacity in investing into NBS and related developments. Moreover, while cities have similarities in their local governance models, the socio-political contexts as well as legislative frameworks differ significantly. When aiming to develop a joint model that represents the different operations in cities implementing NBS, all such differences should be acknowledged.

Moreover, to make the operational model relevant for Baltic Sea Region (BSR) cities beyond consortium, the pertinence should be recognised by cities with no previous experience with NBS as well as by cities leading the way in NBS implementation in BSR. Therefore, the concept of JOM builds on different available models of urban transformation towards sustainable water management as presented by Sayers [2] and Brown [1] as well as the theory for reinventing organizational models as described by Laloux [3]. We illustrate the concept of JOM as a transformative process cycle as shown in Figure below.