Anthropogenic climate change and rapid urbanization are contributing to more frequent and intense urban flooding. There is widespread agreement that traditional gray infrastructure, a single‐purpose solution, fails to address the problem properly and contributes to adverse direct and indirect environmental impacts. As such, Nature‐based Solutions (NbS) can provide improved outcomes to flood risk management along with co‐benefits to society and the economy, as they have numerous benefits incuding often a smaller carbon footprint or even sometimes sequestering carbon. However, there is ambiguity and misconception about NbS and the uptake of NbS for flood management, which is still inadequate compared to traditional gray infrastructure. This research seeks to explore various nature‐based infrastructures including their present status of application for flood risk management to build resilience to urban flooding through a systematic literature review. The robustness of some NbS is questionable and varies across different spatial scales from plot to watershed. NbS can work stand‐alone in many cases as well as supplement traditional gray infrastructure to achieve wider benefits. The review provides a comparison of nature‐based solutions with gray infrastructure, identifies flood mitigation infrastructures that include nature‐based elements, and provides an overview of their effectiveness across different scales. The research findings should contribute to a better understanding of appropriate and diverse options of NbS, gray, and hybrid designs by policymakers and decision‐makers to enable them in effectively designing and implementing urban flood risk mitigation measures.This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Urbanization, Development, and Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies

Combined pressures from climate change, resources demand and environmental degradation could lead to the collapse of marine systems and increase the vulnerability of populations dependent on them. In this paper an adaptability envelope framework is applied to investigate how governance arrangements may be addressing changing conditions of marine social-ecological systems, particularly where thresholds might have been crossed. The analysis focuses on three Australian case studies that have been significantly impacted by variations or changes in weather and climate over the past decade. Findings indicate that, in some cases, global scale drivers are triggering tipping points, which challenge the potential success of existing governance arrangements at the local scale. Governance interventions to address tipping points have been predominantly reactive, despite existing scientific evidence indicating that thresholds are approaching and/or being crossed. It is argued that marine governance arrangements need to be framed so that they also anticipate increasing marine social-ecological system vulnerability, and therefore build appropriate adaptive capacity to buffer against potential tipping points.Griffith Sciences, Griffith School of EnvironmentFull Tex