The term Plant-Based Solutions (PBS) identifies all the solutions, strategies, and interventions based on plants, capable of amplifying the sustainability and resilience of urban systems to climate change, of protecting and restoring biodiversity, and of bringing benefits in terms of health, well-being, air, water, and soil quality. Plant-Based Solutions provide for the use of plants in all dimensions of the built space, without limiting them to canonical, albeit fundamental, places such as parks, avenues, gardens, and flower beds. Used innovatively and efficiently, plants can cover the facades of buildings by reducing energy consumption, produce food on horizontal surfaces, purify the air of indoor environments, provide for the phytoremediation or renaturalization of abandoned and degraded areas, regiment and purify waste water, capture CO2 and filter atmospheric contaminants, responding effectively to the needs of sustainable development of cities. In addition to environmental benefits, they produce also economic, social, and psycho-physical advantages, and directly affect the quality of life of the inhabitants.

For Prato Urban Jungle, Pnat's multidisciplinary team is responsible for drafting guidelines for the use of Nature and Plant-Based Solutions in architecture. The Guidelines collect and classify PBS applications at the scale of the building and its pertinences and identify the criteria for evaluating the benefits generated. They also define a performance index, the Urban Jungle Factor, which is a fundamental operational tool for assessing the social, environmental, and economic impact of each solution, allowing to measure the soundness and sustainability of projects.