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This chapter provides a brief historical review of nature-based solutions (NBS) to address increasing climate extremes in urban areas and their surroundings, tracing their historical evolution to their current moment as du jour solutions to multiple crises. We review how this term has evolved through multiple iterations used across sectors and its current ubiquity in global policy discussion forums like the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), due to its potential as a “swiss knife” to meet multiple global goals in climate, sustainable development, and biodiversity. We evaluate the gaps between the ubiquity of NBS in current geopolitical discourses around urban resilience and sustainability and actual implementation in cities around the world. While countries are increasingly committing to NBS and similar approaches in national climate commitments, lacking data, technical capacity, and funding continue to limit implementation beyond relatively marginal projects insufficient to shifting worsening trends in climate change and biodiversity loss. We close with four guiding principles for addressing these gaps, emphasizing the importance of connectivity and scale, assessing the direct effects of climate change on potential NBS performance, quantification and valuation, and the powerful job-creation potential of NBS in creating resilience to multiple crises, including the current global recession due to the COVID-19 pandemic.