Indian cities are experiencing heightened stress from extreme summer heat and increased flooding during monsoons. Rapid and often unplanned urban expansion has transformed natural landscapes into dense built-up areas, intensifying the urban heat island effect, water scarcity, and flood risks. Addressing these converging climate and development pressures requires a systems-level, locally grounded approach.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) — including integrated blue-green-gray infrastructure (BGGI) — offer a strategic alternative to conventional gray urban development. While their benefits are increasingly acknowledged, the pathways for mainstreaming NbS in Indian cities remain unclear, fragmented, and uncoordinated.

To address this, WELL Labs and RMI convened a multi-stakeholder workshop that brought together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and private-sector actors working across water, biodiversity, planning, design, and governance domains. The goal was to identify barriers to NbS adoption and co-develop actionable, context-sensitive solutions across the building, neighborhood, and city scales.

1. Understanding the barriers: Identify barriers hindering the adoption of blue-green-gray infrastructure in urban spaces.
   1. Policy, governance, and finance and incentives barriers: Challenges to integrating solutions into urban development plans, climate action plans, heat action plans, etc.
   2. Challenges from the design and implementation perspective
   3. Challenges that hinder community acceptance as well as effective operations and maintenance
2. Mapping solutions and levers: Determine key levers to unlock blue-green-gray infrastructure at the building, neighborhood, and city scales and move toward implementing the solutions from a multi-stakeholder perspective.
3. Identifying resources to execute solutions: Explore innovative models for promoting collective action for implementation and the operation and maintenance of blue-green-gray infrastructure and passive cooling solutions.

This document presents a detailed overview of those deliberations. The core output is a structured table that maps:

• On-ground problems and lived implementation challenges
• The underlying systemic barriers impeding uptake
• Practical and policy-relevant actions designed to address those barriers
• Descriptions of the interventions needed to operationalize those actions

• Many challenges such as poor uptake, weak maintenance, or low community support are symptoms of deeper misalignments between governance, financing, and implementation systems.
• Localized approaches are essential, given that effectiveness of NbS depends heavily on urban morphology, climate zones, hydrology, and socio-spatial density.
• Critical enablers include data accessibility, performance-linked financing, ecosystem valuation, updated codes and bylaws, and life-cycle accountability.

Exhibit 1: Representation of integrated blue-green-gray infrastructure in our cities

Blue

Green

Gray

Blue +
Green +
Gray

The central takeaway from the workshop was the recognition of a core structural gap: the lack of a comprehensive, integrated NbS policy framework at the national or state level. In the absence of such a framework, existing efforts remain fragmented — limited to isolated pilots with unclear mandates, inconsistent standards, and underutilized financial mechanisms. An overarching policy framework is therefore proposed as a foundational intervention — one that can anchor and integrate all seven strategic intervention areas.

Exhibit 2 presents a visual synthesis of the event’s key insights, illustrating how identified barriers are grouped under distinct levers and linked to high-level strategic interventions. Many of these interventions are cross-cutting and address multiple barriers simultaneously.

Exhibit 2: Mapping barriers and strategic interventions highlighting the need for an integrated NbS policy framework

The following sections are intended as both a diagnostic tool and a blueprint for action. They offer a coherent structure to help national and subnational actors plan, establish, and maintain NbS across Indian cities at scale. The table below is based on the consultation and input received from the stakeholders.

Designing NbS is not just about green features — it’s also about integrating ecological logic into the planning, engineering, and execution cycles of urban development. This section outlines barriers, including the lack of technical standards, spatial data, and the need for hyperlocal design adaptation.

Exhibit 3: Barriers and solutions for design and implementation lever

Robust design standards, improved data usability, and localized approaches are foundational to move NbS from concept to reality.

Mainstreaming NbS requires ecological functions to be assigned with a proper economic value. This facilitates the mobilization of financial resources (including public budgetary allocations, ESG and private sector investment, CSR and philanthropic capital, outcome-linked or blended finance, and community or local level contributions) throughout the life cycle of projects. Beyond addressing urban heat, flood, and water stress, NbS delivers a wide range of co-benefits that are often undervalued in financial decision-making. For example, NbS reduces ambient temperatures — lowering cooling energy demand, improving groundwater recharge, easing urban drought vulnerability, and mitigating flood damage — reducing disaster recovery costs. Quantifying and incorporating these layered benefits into project assessments can unlock more diverse funding streams and justify sustained investment. This section unpacks the disconnect between funding availability and use, weak incentives for adoption, and underdeveloped models for sustainable financing.

Exhibit 4: Barriers and solutions for finance and incentives lever

Strengthening financial architecture through better valuation, incentive design, and life-cycle budgeting is critical to scale NbS beyond pilot projects.

Institutional fragmentation, unclear mandates, and weak coordination mechanisms often hinder NbS implementation in cities. This section addresses structural governance barriers that cut across vertical and horizontal lines, impacting planning, accountability, and long-term stewardship.

Exhibit 5: Barriers and solutions for governance lever

Improving cross-departmental coordination and embedding NbS roles at all levels can enable more consistent, accountable implementation.

Long-term success of NbS hinges not just on design and execution, but also on sustained care and community ownership. This section highlights barriers that arise when operations and maintenance are underfunded, roles are unclear, or the community is not meaningfully engaged leading to deterioration, resistance, or outright failure of otherwise well-conceived interventions.

Exhibit 6: Barriers and solutions for O&M and community acceptance lever

Embedding NbS into local stewardship models and funding structures right from the start is essential to maintain performance, build trust, and ensure lasting public value.

Urban planning and regulatory frameworks often lack formal mandates or operational clarity for incorporating NbS. This section highlights barriers rooted in outdated bylaws, weak spatial integration, and missing definitions of barriers that create fundamental constraints to systemic adoption.

Exhibit 7: Barriers and solutions for policy lever

The central takeaway from the workshop was the urgent need for a comprehensive and integrated policy framework for nature-based solutions at the national and state levels. In the absence of such anchoring, NbS efforts across India remain fragmented — limited to isolated pilots with ambiguous mandates, inconsistent standards, and underutilized financial mechanisms. Establishing a robust policy framework is not just a recommendation but also a foundational imperative to drive coherence and unlock scale across all seven strategic intervention areas.

Exhibit 8: Overarching barrier and solution

Without policy anchoring, NbS efforts remain fragmented and optional. Addressing these gaps is essential to building a common language and legal scaffolding for integration.

This synthesis builds the case and provides the raw architecture for developing an NbS policy. Importantly, the Possible Interventions column in the above table doubles as a proposed table of contents for a potential national or state-level NbS policy or operational guideline. It reflects a grounded understanding of what cities need, including planning frameworks, financial mechanisms, community engagement models, and institutional coordination structures. This offers a suggestive raw architecture for policymakers and stakeholders to build a comprehensive policy or guidelines to enable the integration of nature-based solutions in India’s urban future.

Exhibit 9: Proposed policy action for mainstreaming NbS in Indian cities

Once developed, this national or state-level NbS policy or operational guideline can serve as a go-to reference for unlocking the potential of cities and enabling them to become nature-ready. It can lay the foundation for broader schemes aimed at accelerating the integration of nature-based solutions across Indian cities.