This article first appeared in Landscape Middle East magazine, in May 2025, worded slightly differently.
There is a new opportunity arising within landscape/urban design, of delivering Nature Based Solutions (NBS or NbS) to both our urban and rural landscapes. The design of urban parks, commercial developments and streetscapes need an uplift to become ‘ecosystem communities’ that enrich our lives and deliver broad ecosystem services and NBS. It’s relatively simple to achieve, provided the right framework is put in place at the outset of development design briefs. It is also possible to upgrade or retrofit existing landscapes to fulfil NBS.
So, what is NBS? Nature-based Solutions are defined as “actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services, resilience and biodiversity benefits” – (UNEP/EA.5/Res.5).
A Google AI definition of Urban NBS says ”Urban nature-based solutions are strategies that utilize natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges while simultaneously benefiting both people and nature in urban areas. These solutions involve integrating natural elements into the built environment to improve various aspects of urban life, such as climate resilience, biodiversity, and human well-being.”
To design ecologically, we have to shift our design thinking from linear to multi-dimensional, seeing systems as a series of interconnected webs, within which we find and create connections. Holistic thinking shifts awareness to a level where we perceive and design for multiple outcomes, which may go above and beyond the client brief.
From an urban landscape perspective, designing with NBS is about building micro-ecologies with the trees, shrubs and other plants we use. The outcome is something which creates microclimate but also contributes to adaptive macro-climatic changes.
With this ethos, we build plant communities that are beneficial to each other, and generate conditions which are beneficial to soil microbes, insects and birds that form a part of such a community. They should also sit together comfortably in their respective plant guilds. A guild, according to one definition (Wilson, 1999) is “a group of species that are similar in some way that is ecologically relevant.”
One difference between an urban and a wild ecosystem is that browsing animals such as goats or camels are absent, and they naturally shape the growth of trees, shrubs, herbs and grasses. Our management of plants should replicate those actions, by correct pruning. Cyclical pollarding or coppicing replicates browsing, opens up the canopy to light, allows understories to flourish and feeds dynamic change, or cyclical rhythm.
This perception prompts a subtle mind-shift in how we see our landscapes, where aesthetics are not the only consideration, but one of several design layers. The base layer is the soil and this is usually a much-neglected part of landscape (see other blog posts linked at the end). We have to understand that vastly more life occurs hidden in the soil than in the vegetative parts we see, so we should plan and provide for soil as much as the above-ground layers.
In typical hardscaped areas, soil volumes are often inadequate for long-term growth and health, especially in available root zone width. For tree planting, too many planting pits are isolated when they could have subterranean connection, using suitable substrates and structural crate systems. In an urban context, ribbon planting is an effective way of making larger, connected soil volumes which fit the urban fabric but which deliver a healthier soil substrate.
It helps to understand the soil supports a network called the ‘wood wide web’ consisting of roots, mycorrhizal fungi, microbes, insects etc. If these elements are isolated, plants cannot communicate (via chemical signaling) nor share resources – for example, mycorrhizal fungi provide water and nutrients to the roots of trees, shrubs and perennials/grasses, whilst for some species, bacteria fix atmospheric nitrogen in the roots. One tree may provide water to another via this network, supporting a stressed neighbour. Hydraulic redistribution can occur with some trees, taking in deep water and emitting it at lateral root levels. All these processes need good, living soil to function well.
For these hidden assets to work, they have to be present in the soil, or be introduced, and when we import desert soil and mix it with compost, there are few of these essential microbes present. Given the right conditions, ecosystems build up complexity with time, but we must consciously kick-start this process.
The water table should also be seen as a layer as this has an important interaction with the deeper-rooted trees; this can vary seasonally and over longer timescales, for any given location, and of course salinity is a big factor, which may predetermine which plants we can use.
The next design principle is to understand the niche this planting occupies within its environment. The environmental (abiotic) factors of a location should determine which plants will survive and thrive in any given situation, considering factors such as wind, light, salt loading (both soil and wind borne), soil type and depth and of course, water availability. Because we artificially provide some of these, especially water, we sometimes overlook the importance of the other factors. In coastal areas, appropriate zoning should be used (the subject of a future post).
Designing ecosystem services might also dictate the positioning of planted areas. Windbreaks, for example, or stormwater catchment areas. Drainage via below-grade planting beds, where water can be retained until it percolates away, is a simple management tool, whilst the right plants can provide phytoremediation (purification) for water and soil pollution where required. Shade and evaporative cooling by trees may be the biggest benefit in an arid environment, reducing pavement temperatures and making summer heat more bearable.
When it comes to planting design, layering is the most natural way to create guilds; this concept is familiar but again, it is a matter of applying the ecological aspects. On a recent consultancy, I saw sun-loving desert natives planted as a tree understory layer, which is not the right association for these plants. Inevitably, these will struggle in the tree shade and the scheme will be less successful than it could have been. Depending on the niche and guild, there might be a number of layers: emergent (palm/tall tree), canopy (medium tree), sub canopy (shrub) and ground (herbs, perennials, ground-covering plants).
Mulch should be treated as a layer in itself, for this is the organic content that enters the soil ecosystem. I always see leaf litter removed to keep things tidy, but this is how nutrients cycle though the system, so we need to leave the organic duff that builds up under plants and trees and add to it annually. A shaded soil will hold more moisture, lower temperatures and allow greater microbial function and activity. Mineral mulches should be avoided.
Plant communities are all the species that will live together in a beneficial manner. Each layer or guild will consist of plants that tolerate or require the conditions present in that layer, the most dominant of which are light requirements. Whilst this is understood from a landscape context, how a plant co-exists with its neighbours in that layer is important. Another important aspect is how the plants benefit insects and birds, and in this respect, flowering times should be chosen to cover as much of the season as possible (which also increases human experience and enjoyment). Single, open flowers which provide easy access to nectar are preferred to doubles, or pom-pom flower types. Some plants exude allelopathic compounds from roots and fallen leaves, which can be inhibitory to other species, though probably more to seedling germination than mature plants.
The aspect we are most used to dealing with is that of aesthetics. Large monocultures are unable to create complex community, so mixed or matrix-style planting is always more productive. We need to review our fondness for block-planting, which ecologically and from a NBS perspective is a wasted opportunity. That’s not to say that we must cram in many different species (natural guilds can be simple), but they do need to reach a level of critical complexity in order to come alive. We might see aethetics as an overylay, rather than a layer, as it applies to all the differing components.
The final layer is time. All landscapes change over time, nothing is static. Plants grow and die, environmental factors shift, water availability fluctuates. Our human mind might not perceive such changes, for we live in a ‘creeping normality’ and nature has a slow rhythm, but we should be aware of the changes over time. The rapid effects of climate change are changing our awareness.
Our mature, trditional landscapes are too often kept in stasis, from which plants can only remain static or decline. Change is seen as an expensive negative, spoiling the original design and costing money. No-one is tasked to maintain any vision of growth or adaption over time, a dynamic that NBS requires. Climate change is accelerating the rate of environmental change to speeds we cannot ignore, so the question is not ‘what are we faced with now’, so much as ‘what’s coming next’? We need to plan for resilient, adaptive, ecological communities.
Creating living, biodiverse landscapes delivers Nature Based Solutions and other ecosystem services. They need not cost more to create, nor to maintain, they just need a different approach and understanding. It’s time we asked more from our landscapes, and that means asking more from what we expect. We can do that, realizing that we get out of a holistically designed space, far more than just the sum of its parts.
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