Valencia, Spain faces growing climate risks; including intensifying heatwaves, flooding, drought, and the urban heat island effect; making Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) an increasingly important strategy for advancing urban resilience. To understand and accelerate this transition, this study explores the barriers and enabling factors shaping NbS implementation through semi-structured interviews with 11 key actors from: academia, consulting, public administration, civil associations, and private developers. The analysis identifies 121 specific barriers and 127 enablers, including limited technical expertise, regulatory gaps, funding constraints, cultural resistance, political will, effective communication, evidence generation, and citizen engagement. Understanding these dynamics is essential to inform evidence-bases policy and scale NbS in Valencia.
Fernández-Garza et al. (Thu,) studied this question.