Towards operationalizing nature’s value in Minnesota’s decision-making

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly recognized as critical to achieving climate mitigation, resilience, and biodiversity goals under global frameworks including the Paris Agreement, the Global Goal on Adaptation, and the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Yet their integration into decision-making systems remains fragmented, limiting their effectiveness and scalability. We evaluate how NbS are operationalized across public, private, and community sectors in Minnesota using a structured framework of 15 criteria spanning knowledge gaps, implementation challenges, and emerging opportunities. The analysis integrates AI-assisted policy review, expert validation, and stakeholder dialogues across a sample of 27 policy and strategic documents. NbS are widely present in practice but remain inconsistently defined, measured, and governed. While communication and policy alignment perform relatively strongly, key enabling conditions—conceptual clarity, ecosystem services valuation, financing transparency, and inclusive governance—consistently underperform. Sectoral patterns reveal that public institutions emphasize policy integration, private actors focus on reporting and resource allocation, and community organizations center equity but face structural capacity constraints. This reveals a persistent implementation gap: NbS are adopted as fragmented interventions rather than institutionalized as a coherent pathway for climate and development outcomes. Closing this implementation gap requires embedding NbS within economic decision-making frameworks, standardizing definitions and metrics, integrating ecosystem service valuation, and advancing adaptive, justice-centered governance. Without such systemic integration, NbS risk remaining rhetorically prominent but operationally marginal. This study provides a transferable framework for diagnosing and advancing the institutionalization of NbS, with broader implications for accelerating nature-positive and equitable transitions.