Nature Based Solutions
At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, plants are both beautiful and powerful.
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Plants soak up water, cool and clean the environment, and provide food and habitat for wildlife. These incredible abilities are in strong demand across urban environments, where we are now using plants to help combat big challenges:
- Higher intensity storms and flooding are on the rise, estimated to cost the UK £1.3 billion per year.
- Global temperatures are increasing, with the 2022 summer heatwave claiming more than 60,000 lives across Europe.
- Biodiversity loss—the decline and disappearance of insect, plant, bird, and other wildlife species—is happening across the planet, driven by habitat loss, human influence, and climate change.
Our climate is experiencing shifts that current urban infrastructure was not designed to handle. By mimicking natural ecosystems and putting the right plants in the right place, we can help tackle flooding, cool our environment, improve biodiversity, and provide healing green spaces for human wellbeing. These multi-benefit endeavors are the exciting world of nature-based solutions.
RBGE’s nature-based solutions programme provides scientific evidence, develops cross-disciplinary skills, and invests in knowledge exchange with our many partners across society. Nature-based solutions are embedded in the fabric of RBGE’s vision.
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Research
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Research is at the heart of our programme, demonstrating how plants are central to successfully mitigating the effects of climate change and repairing the ecosystem of our urban environment. Driving our applied research is the five-year Plants with Purpose programme, investigating the functional traits of plants in an exciting collaboration with academic and industry partners. Plants with Purpose focuses on the key issues of flood attenuation, temperature regulation, and biodiversity restoration.
Innovation
RBGE operates as a ‘living laboratory’, where we can test and monitor nature-based solutions right on our grounds. Using sensors throughout the wider RBGE landscape, we study changes in soil moisture, temperature, water flow, and biodiversity in real time.
Gathering this scientific evidence provides the opportunity for our partners and the public to see practical solutions to current problems, solutions that are both functional and beautiful.
Knowledge exchange
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Who do we work with? Nature-based solutions touch every aspect of society in our shared efforts to tackle and respond to climate change. Through a diverse programme of events, workshops, consultations and publications we work with a wide range of sectors from national and local Government to academia, industry, community organisations and individuals. One million visitors pass through our gardens every year, providing a special opportunity to share our scientific research on nature-based solutions and the ways we make our towns and cities better.
Visit RBGE for Nature Based Solutions
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Demonstration sites at RBGE include green roofs, stormwater planters, living lawns, bioretention ponds, and more. Our flagship project is a stunning raingarden, planted in 2019 to solve persistent flooding. The paths by the raingarden no longer flood, the garden is irrigated only by rain, and five years later the plants are still thriving. Our raingarden is a collaboration between RBGE scientists, horticulturists, and staff at Heriot Watt University. This has become a shared outdoor space to facilitate discussion about urban flooding.
Before: a flooded lawn and path on the future site of the experimental rain garden.
After: the planted experimental rain garden, which absorbs and controls flooding.
Explore nature-based solutions within our Gardens
Nature Based Solutions ‘address societal challenges through the protection, sustainable management and restoration of both natural and modified ecosystems, benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being. Nature-based Solutions are underpinned by benefits that flow from healthy ecosystems.’
- International Union for the Conservation of Nature