Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) can strengthen urban stormwater resilience, but its benefits depend on widespread adoption across neighborhoods. Despite growing policy support, adoption remains highly uneven, limiting collective impact. Here, to understand the drivers of this variation, we develop a spatially explicit agent-based model informed by household survey, census and parcel-level data from Austin, Texas, and simulate the uptake of rain-catching and structural GSI practices under varying social and structural constraints. We find that sustained diffusion requires the alignment of three factors: visibility of nearby installations, conversion capacity (feasibility and affordability) and social reinforcement through social capital. No single factor is sufficient to trigger widespread adoption. Depending on how these factors interact over time, neighborhoods experience rapid takeoff, delayed diffusion, episodic growth or persistent stagnation. These findings advance theoretical understanding of nature-based solution adoption and provide actionable insights for identifying neighborhood-specific barriers and accelerating GSI implementation in cities.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00520-1