Cities concentrate people, infrastructure, and economic activity, creating vulnerabilities and risks to damaging impacts of climate change, extreme weather events, and other social and economic shocks. These hazards are increasing worldwide and thus rapid investments to shift current trajectories from vulnerable to resilient ones are paramount. Though traditional hard engineered strategies will still be required, there is an urgent need to harness the role of nature-based strategies to support climate change adaptation and resilience. Nature-based solutions (NBS) provide multiple benefits including for flood protection, air and water quality regulation, and urban cooling while contributing to climate change mitigation and sustaining or enhancing biodiversity. Yet despite increasing adoption of NBS, key questions remain for how to scale up and equitably advance NBS, particularly for vulnerable communities in urban areas to avoid severe social and economic consequences of near and longer-term climate change.Drawing from research and diverse global contributions to a new book, “Nature-based Solutions in Cities” this session will discuss the current state of the art in advancing NBS in, with and for cities and how urban ecological research can improve mainstreaming of NBS for urban resilience and equity. This session will focus on discussing how NBS can be better managed, planned, and engaged with, and to answer questions of NBS for what and for whom? How far are we from a nature-based urbanism? Paul Cosio and co-author Zoe Hamstead will discuss effective NBS types for urban heat and air pollution mitigation, and in particular, through people-centered experiences with NBS as an integrated social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) to address heat and air hazards. Lauren McPhillips et al. will explore examples of NBS to manage water resources, particularly highlighting hybrid ecological-technological examples explicitly engineered to manage stormwater such as wetlands or parks. Scott Maclvor and co-authors will examine the importance of biodiversity for nature-based solutions, highlighting two major components of urban green infrastructure that gain in importance with changing climate: street trees and green roofs. Finally, Anne Guerry and colleagues will highlight recent theories and practices of valuation--in both monetary and non-monetary terms--of nature-based solutions in cities. Our goal is to provide examples of emerging NBS strategies from the global south and north contexts, and provide a synthesis of key knowledge and learning for advancing the science of NBS in cities and set the stage for a rich discussion of the research and practice frontiers for next-generation NBS.