Urban And Building-Level Nature-Based Solutions For Climate Change Mitigation In Nigeria: Opportunities And Challenges

Abstract

Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) are strategies aimed at efficiently and adaptively protecting, managing, and restoring natural or modified ecological systems to address societal and environmental challenges. NbS has gained traction in the face of climate change, increased flooding, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, and deforestation for development. Yet the literature increasingly shows that their urban applications deserve more focused synthesis, particularly at the scale of buildings and surrounding built environments. This study employs a systematised narrative review to examine scholarship in building-based NbS and the broader urban NbS discourse. Findings reveal the social and ecological benefits of interventions such as green roofs, living walls, vertical greenery, courtyard greening, rain gardens, bioswales, and other forms of blue-green infrastructure integrated into buildings and neighbourhoods. The review examines the main benefits attributed to these approaches, including urban heat reduction, stormwater management, energy savings, air-quality improvement, biodiversity support, aesthetic enhancement, and physical and mental health co-benefits. It also evaluates major trade-offs and opposing views in the literature, such as high upfront costs, maintenance burdens, performance variability across climates and building types, water demand, uncertain carbon benefits, and concerns about unequal access, green gentrification, and the depoliticisation of structural decarbonisation. Findings also show that existing research has paid greatest attention to technical performance, thermal regulation, runoff control, and economic valuation, with green roofs and walls far more studied than other building-based NbS. By contrast, important gaps remain in long-term monitoring, biodiversity outcomes at the building scale, social justice implications, governance, financing models, and evidence from African and other Global South cities. The paper concludes that building-based urban NbS can make meaningful contributions to climate adaptation, mitigation, and urban liveability when designed as context-specific, multifunctional, and socially just interventions within broader urban settings.