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 intervention