Lea-Celin Maymona Conteh-Seim & Sara Zulin

Transforming Urban Water Management: Understanding Barriers to Implementing Nature-Based Solutions in Denmark

Urban climate adaptation increasingly emphasises nature-based solutions (NbS) as an approach to managing stormwater, improving biodiversity, and enhancing everyday urban environments. However, despite their benefits, NbS remain the exception rather than the norm in Danish municipal planning. In practice, NbS projects often stall, are scaled back, or are deprioritised in favour of conventional grey infrastructure This raises the central question of our thesis: why do NbS remain difficult to implement in Danish cities despite recognition of their benefits, and how do governance and planning processes shape this outcome?   

We combined policy and regulatory analysis with qualitative insights from practitioners across municipalities, national advisory bodies, environmental design studios and engineering consultancies. This interdisciplinary approach enabled us to examine how decision-making unfolds across organisational scales and professional domains. Through this, we identified four interconnected categories of barriers: regulatory (unclear mandates and responsibilities, contradicting legislation), economic (difficulty justifying and financing NbS within existing economic frameworks), social and organisational dynamics (institutional risk aversion, siloed planning cultures and differing professional values), and ecological or site-specific constraints (maintenance considerations, spatial limitations and hydrological uncertainty).  

To support practitioners in responding to these challenges, we developed a visual barriermapping overview that synthesises these findings and can be used in early project stages to clarify assumptions, align expectations and identify implementation risks before design decisions are finalised. Rather than presenting NbS as a primarily technical task, the thesis demonstrates that successful implementation depends on integrated governance, crossdisciplinary collaboration and spatially sensitive planning practices.  

Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions in Danish urban planning regarding the shift from pilot projects to the systematic uptake of NbS as part of long-term climate adaptation strategies. As flood risks increase and urban areas face pressure to become more resilient, the capacity to plan and implement NbS effectively represents not only an environmental challenge, but also a spatial, institutional and societal one, situated at the core of contemporary geographical inquiry.