Lorna Winship's blog

The Quest for Nature-Based Solutions in the City or Why we need to Replace Optimism with Hope…

Lorna Winship — Mon, 31 May 2021 11:58:01 +0000

In the five years since we began the NATURVATION project, nature-based solutions have gone from being the concern of a small policy elite and the academically curious to becoming headline news. Across the world commitments to plant trees are piling up while the climate-saving potential of everything from mangroves to peat bogs are celebrated globally. If the urban is often absent from such promises, it is clear that nature-based solutions are rapidly acquiring hero status in both the biodiversity and climate policy arenas.

This should not really come as a surprise. The hero narrative – in this case where a protagonist is able to defeat the monster that is climate change/the loss of biodiversity/the COVID-19 pandemic and perhaps even all three at once – has dominated the sustainability policy arena over the past three decades. The next COP meeting, the introduction of a carbon tax, a new technology or individual everyday heroes are called upon to save society from impending doom. The result is, as Lesley Head has written about in her book Hope & Grief in the Anthropocene an almost ubiquitous and often relentless call for (techno) optimism and for ‘solutions’ to the problems that we have both created and now must face. For Christiana Figueres, widely credited with enabling the 2015 Paris Agreement, "you do not go at a battle or a challenge with pessimism, because by definition you will not win. So that is why I bring [a] tsunami of optimism to this whole darn thing - because we have to.”

So far, so good you might think. We have a new hero in town – nature-based solutions – and they are super-powered as not only do they offer the potential to tackle climate change, but can do so while also addressing biodiversity and a wide range of sustainability challenges. Yet if we insist on wrapping nature-based solutions in a super-hero cloak, we are already undone. Addressing climate change is a far from heroic tale. It cannot rely on single protagonists with super-powers, and will always be a flawed and incomplete endeavour. Rather than think in terms of heroes and the beasts that they slay, when it comes to our imagination of the powers of nature-based solutions we are better off following the narrative plot of the quest. Here the hero together with many allies, gifts and good fortune sets off on a journey which requires collaboration, cunning and more than a few losses along the way. This a challenging journey, with many setbacks and problems. The protagonist is far from perfect and the end of the quest unclear. It is instead the journey that matters most as through the encounters it lets the protagonist and their associates grow, gain wisdom and come to agreement about how matters can be resolved and the place they call home can thrive.

Our work in NATURVATION has shown too that nature-based solutions are far from perfect. They have the capacity to address multiple sustainability challenges, but this should not be taken for granted – the right conditions and companions are needed to grow this potential. Nature-based solutions have the possibility of addressing urban problems, of being the hero we are often told to hold out for, but at the same time they can create challenges of their own, such as exacerbating existing urban inequalities or enabling urban growth to proceed unchecked. The tidal wave of optimism that nature-based solutions have attracted in the past five years risks washing away these rather inconvenient truths as it gathers momentum in the run up to COP15 and COP26. While our work provides strong evidence that nature-based solutions can support action for both climate change and biodiversity, it is clear that there is work to be done if these outcomes are to be realised while at the same time enhancing social and environmental justice.

Indeed, our work suggests that just because we should caution against the unabated optimism that is placed in nature-based solutions, does not mean that we should be without hope. As Head (2016: 11) argues, “hope savours the life and world we have, not the world as we wish it to be.” In contrast to the ideal world of optimism, hope has to be crafted, formed and worked at, all the time knowing that things could be otherwise, that disappointment and loss are just around the corner. And in our work across six partner cities in Europe and case-studies around the world, this is how we have seen nature-based solutions take root, in the openings they offer to do and think differently about ourselves and our collective urban future. To have and make hope, even in the face of possible failure.

And as with nature-based solutions, so too with the life of research projects. NATURVATION came into this world as a half formed idea between a few colleagues who wanted a new challenge to gather around, accruing companions along the way in the unlikely settings all the way between a Swedish research panel evaluation meeting and a café in Paris. This has been a quest like no other I have taken, and certainly the journey has had its ups and downs along the way, but it has for me always been a collective project and one through which I have learnt a great deal about what it means to undertake academic leadership in a way that firmly rejects the hero narrative and instead seeks to develop a more collaborative, collective approach to a shared journey and one in which we all can thrive. I will always be grateful to everyone who came on this journey and made our project grow, gain wisdom and resolve some of the key challenges concerning how we can ensure nature-based solutions work to enable diverse and just urban futures.

Harriet Bulkeley is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University and Project Co-ordinator for NATURVATION.

Project Community Garden – Writing an Academic Blog

Lorna Winship — Thu, 20 May 2021 10:00:44 +0000

What is it about a lockdown that sees humans emerging out of their enclaves and venturing forth into nature? The moment we are told to stay behind our doors is the moment we seek earth and solace in the sun.

Gardens are a curious thing. They're a way in which humans can tame, claim and frame the earth – as if the earth was ever something up for the taking. Gardens can act as a place of privacy yet also leave humans exposed to nature. Growing up in the city of London, I enjoyed my back garden and never once thought about sharing it. To the urban dweller – shared spaces seemed to belong to the vernacular streetscapes and parks. 'Community garden' was not in my lexicon. In 2019 having just moved to Durham from London I began to see farms with animals, fruits and vegetables in a semi-wild state on country walks. I began to wonder what it might look like to bring this facet of nature into the city.

Learning from Naturvation, I divided six weeks of my 2019 summer between the offices in Durham and boroughs of Camden and Islington researching community gardens for sites of wellbeing and interaction. As a research opportunity, it was particularly valuable as I got to meet people from all walks of life- and learn the power of plants. When it came to the write-up it seemed as though my fieldnotes, questionnaires and interviews did not do justice to my experience of gardening. The story I wanted to tell about community gardens had to be a visual one and needed to be told through multiple lenses. As 2020 approached bearing new challenges I was devasted to not be able to return to Camden. Given so much data and experience having hands in the soil, a friend posed the idea of creating an academic blog to chart my experiences and observations.

More than a space for opinion pieces, an academic blog gave me the freedom to incorporate my photography alongside illustrations of some of the people I met, create updates with interviews from those working academically and those heading up projects. Somewhere in the space between a portfolio, a diary and a journal came this academic blog. I was so drawn to the study of community gardens as a place to experience vitality and growth, that my findings and outcome needed to be just as visual. The blog titled 'Project Community Garden' centres around the Calthorpe Project and Castlehaven Community Garden with photographs taken during my time.

Central to writing a blog is a time for personal reflection – and in such light, I would like to take this opportunity to thank three individuals who allowed this to happen. Suzanne - my Laidlaw university coordinator for pushing me to be more creative in the face of challenges, Nichola – my friend at Castlehaven who always made time for my interviews and finally my supervisor Professor Harriet Bulkeley for teaching me that research is a skill requiring practice, patience and inspiration – virtues I was incredibly fortunate to learn under such women.

Navya Lobo is studying BA Geography at Durham University

What about urban green inequalities?

Lorna Winship — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 14:29:34 +0000

Nature-based solutions are said to hold a strong potential to drive the urban sustainability agenda and meet societal challenges like climate change, food and water security, disaster risk reduction, socio-economic development and healthy lives. A key concern for social scholars and environmental justice activists is how the benefits of new urban nature are to be distributed and through what means - questions that are even more pertinent in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

With the Lab on Urban Environmental Justice Barcelona at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona we have been exploring how diverse nature-based solutions in 18 cities globally are distributed. The findings are disturbing – we see that these interventions are increasingly taking place in privileged urban areas, with benefits that accrue mostly to those in higher socio-economic and majority ethnic groups. Further, of the 54 projects we studied, only 9 had justice and equity considerations integrated into their deployment and design and, of these, 7 were small-scale community gardens that struggle to remain alive.

Our work suggests then that planning for new, large-scale nature-based solutions frequently overlooks issues of social justice and that newly-developed greening projects could end up deepening existing inequalities. Take a small, seemingly innocuous and very positive intervention such as the conversion of a boulevard into a green avenue, as in the case of Passeig St Joan in Barcelona. It is a wonderful project where sidewalks were expanded, allowing for more pedestrian, rest and child-play areas; new heat-resistant vegetation and semi-permeable pavement were installed, allowing for more cooling and water run-off.

Yet, looking at the neighbourhood before and after this intervention we find a few puzzles: the number of expensive food and drink venues increased, chasing cheaper Chinese outlets away; flats in the area were profiled as located upon a green-street and sold as upper-end living spaces, pushing up the housing market. In terms of the process of decision-making, we find that local neighbourhood organisations had a different proposal that could have led to different outcomes. Groups were advocating for an avenue with a broad central walking alley in the middle, free of bars and other commerce, high trees and smaller car-lanes on both sides. The proposal was not adopted by the planners as it did not align with local commercial interests: larger sidewalks provide for more retail, restaurant and bars space than a central alley. As this example shows, often it is the voices of long-term or socially vulnerable residents that remain silenced in urban remodeling and refurbishing, particularly when they do not fit with the political needs of the day.

Through our work at the Lab, we have found that nature-based solutions are often implemented in wealthier parts of the city, or push up the housing prices and eventually, the cost of living, in their surroundings. Furthermore, nature-based solutions tend to be treated as decorative, ornamental, non-intrusive, orchestrated forms of nature, ones that easily align with the need to promote economic development. Such forms of urban greening, however, are hardly able to achieve their sustainability promises. To highlight these issues, our blog on urban green inequalities where members of the Lab share thoughts, experiences and research around questions of equity and greening provides a number of reflections and ideas on how to make our cities more just and ecologically grounded.

Filka Sekulova is a researcher for the Naturvation project

Paved square to public park: a case study from Utrecht

Lorna Winship — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 11:10:04 +0000

As part of the NATURVATION project, Utrecht has been examining nature-based solutions projects in the city. The Roerplein Pocket Park is one of our best examples of a successful citizen-led intervention, and began as an initiative by a local social entrepreneur to turn a paved public square into a park.

In an effort to support local urban green space interventions, the city of Utrecht developed the Neighborhood Green Plan project, providing funding and support for such projects. As Jeron Schenkels from the Utrecht municipality explained, “Initially, we wanted to get experts like landscape architects, ecologists, and social workers to analyse potentials and vulnerabilities in neighborhoods. But we didn’t choose to do this because we wanted the money to go directly to the citizens.” In 2015, the Roerplein Pocket Park was proposed.

The small park was built within a highly paved neighborhood with little green space, and is managed by local citizens with the support of the municipality. Citizens of the affected neighborhood are sometimes distrustful of the city government, so a female social entrepreneur led the project, supported by a local environmental NGO. As Anne-Mette van Lieshout (the entrepreneur and landscape architect) stated, “It was not the municipality organising something, it was us, enthusiastic women that [Roerplein residents] had seen around before. Because in these types of neighborhoods, they’ll automatically go into resistance when they even hear the word municipality.”

The Neighborhood Green Plan was successful in other neighbourhoods, as well, and each of the 10 funded neighborhoods in Utrecht developed at least 10 initiatives based on resident proposals. One third of these projects are still managed by citizens, leading to higher rates of success. Green spaces are likely to be vandalised and more likely to be actively used when they are developed together with residents, so community management was a very important criterion for the city. The Roerplein park is still managed by community volunteers.

This project created a bridge between the municipality and a neighborhood that is often distrusting of local government. This has led to increased social cohesion and citizen engagement in Utrecht. We were able to give a bit of power back to the people, which is always our goal. Then, of course, there are the other benefits like reduced urban heat stress and enhanced neighbourhood attractiveness.

One issue that we still have is encouraging long-term engagement. There is a lack of interest in volunteering for garden maintenance, which is necessary. We need to find a way to either promote volunteering or reduce dependence on volunteers. Overall, though, Roerplein Pocket Park was a successful initiative that improved social cohesion in our city and demonstrated that nature-based solutions do not always come from the top-down.

Erin Danford is working as an intern at ICLEI Europe and supporting the Naturvation project

Updating the Urban Nature Atlas

Lorna Winship — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 10:02:58 +0000

The Urban Nature Atlas (www.naturvation.eu/atlas) contains 1,000 examples of nature-based solutions from 100 European cities. The data providing the basis of the Atlas was collected via discourse analysis from secondary sources, during the summer of 2017 involving 20 Masters students from CEU, Lund University and the University of Utrecht.

Since its launch in 2018, the Urban Nature Atlas has been recognised as the largest data collection effort on nature-based solutions to date, has been promoted in various events and platforms and used as a resource for various research efforts focused on nature-based solutions. To date over 40,000 people have visited the Urban Nature Atlas and selected datasets of the Atlas have been provided to more than 30 researchers/projects.

As the majority of the data included in the Atlas was collected in 2017, some of this information has inevitably become outdated. In an effort to correct out-of-date information and research recent developments with the nature-based solution projects, an extensive and systematic review of the Urban Nature Atlas has been carried out over the past 2 months and will continue until mid-October.

The database update also includes the collection of additional data that emerged as being potentially relevant for future nature-based solution research. The new version of the Urban Nature Atlas will contain a detailed characterisation of the sustainability challenges that are driving the implementation of the nature-based solution projects, a precise collection of geographical data, as well as more detailed data on the costs of the projects, and among other types of data, information on the expected and/or achieved environmental, socio-cultural and economic impacts of nature-based solutions.

Keep an eye on the Naturvation website for the upcoming new version of the Urban Nature Atlas planned for December 2020!

Vertical forests and green bus stops: Utrecht raises the bar on rooftop greening

Lorna Winship — Thu, 07 May 2020 13:27:08 +0000

It started with a seemingly sudden refurbishment of all bus stops in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. From April 2019, 316 of Utrecht’s bus stops were fitted with green roofs by an advertisement agency, in response to a tender by the municipality for ideas to promote healthy urban living. The value of these green bus stops is not just good publicity – although the initiative has commanded quite some attention from news outlets from Germany to Australia, Ukraine, and Mexico – they actually do support local biodiversity: for flying insects these patches of green spread out through the city make all the difference, says Harry Boesschoten, programme director Green Metropole at Staatsbosbeheer (the Dutch state forest management agency).

As a next step in the city’s urban greening process, a new policy will increase the effort on urban greening. A city-wide strategy will follow an already popular grant scheme for rooftop greening by homeowners, which covers 50% of the costs (with a maximum of €20,000 per application), as well as the development of an urban eye-catcher in the form of a ‘vertical forest’. This building, Wonderwoods, is set to be completed in 2022 and will include 360 trees and 9,640 shrubs and flowers. The rooftop greening subsidy was so popular that the budget to meet the demand was recently raised from €100,000 to €500,000. The municipality is now exploring whether the current subsidy scheme for private homeowners can be converted for buildings with a societal function, such as schools.

Utrecht’s new green roof policy hopes to accomplish that ‘no roof will be left unused’ it was reported in "The Guardian”. A sort of city-wide green roof obligation, as implied by the Guardian, will however not be legally feasible, says Jeanet Hekhuis of Utrecht municipality. But the plans to be developed will likely set high standards for urban greening, especially in the large scale area developments in Merwedekanaalzone and the Beurskwartier, and in doing so involve numerous stakeholder groups in the greening process.

Hade Dorst is a Researcher at Utrecht University working on the NATURVATION project

Will 2020 be a golden year for nature?

Lorna Winship — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 14:35:31 +0000

How can nnature-based solutions - actions to conserve, manage or restore nature to address societal challenges – be used for combating biodiversity loss and supporting climate change mitigation and/or adaptation and disaster risk reduction while delivering further benefits including human health? This question was central at the workshop on Mobilizing up-scaling of Nature-based Solutions for climate change throughout 2020 and beyond organised by the European Commission on 4th and 5th February in Brussels.

From a relatively marginal position, nature-based solutions are increasingly recognised as a fundamental part of action for climate and biodiversity. Participants heard from one of the co-chairs of the IPBES Global Assessment, Josef Settele, and David Nabarro, Nature-Based Solutions Coalition Facilitator, both that authoritative research indicates that NBS can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 and that the issue is rapidly coming to the top of political agendas globally. If we can achieve nature’s mitigation potential of 10-12 gigatons of CO₂ per year, it was suggested, this will play an essential role in stabilising warming to below 2 °C by 2050.

This notion that climate and nature are strongly interconnected are giving nature-based solutions crucial political weight and momentum. There are a growing number of reports and platforms being developed to showcase their role, including the recent Nature-Based Solutions Contributions Platform and the Compendium of Contributions Nature-Based Solutions, hosted by the UN Environment Programme as part of the recent UN Climate Action Summit. The flagship report of the Global Commission on Adaptation (GCA) makes a plea for more nature-inclusive development. And the European Green Deal identifies nature-based solutions as a critical part of Europe’s response to these twin crises. In the run up to crucial meetings of the Convention on Biodiversity, to be held in Kunming in October 2020, and the UNFCCC, taking place in Glasgow in November 2020, it appears that 2020 could signal the coming of age of nature-based solutions.

But will 2020 prove to be a golden year for nature? Most obviously, nature stands to be exploited by those who are seeking an easy way out of action on climate change – as the debate over the Trillion Trees programme demonstrates. Yet on a different register, there are more deep-seated political risks to address. A common theme running through the discussions in Brussels was the very different ways the global discourses on nature on the one hand and climate on the other have evolved and become institutionalized in different governance modes, monitoring and evaluation schemes, as well as in actions on the ground. Bringing these two ‘worlds’ together will not be without pitfalls and risks.

The attractiveness of the discourse on urban nature-based solutions was noted as an example of what could be at stake. In this discourse the multiple benefits of nature for the daily lives and livelihoods of various communities is relatively strong and gives traction to a multiplicity of emerging nature-based solutions, many of which are highly contextual and experimental. As we are finding in the NATURVATION project, assessing such initiatives solely on the potential for greenhouse gas emission reductions compared to technological options would most certainly favour the later over the former. But such evaluations tend not to take account of the broader societal benefits, and more importantly the different levels of social acceptance facing each of these kinds of intervention let alone the potential of such pathways for ‘nature-inclusive development’ in the future. Without a strong approach to recognising the wider contribution of nature to society the potential for making 2020 a golden year for nature and society may be lost.

In Brussels this month, research and policy communities bought new perspectives together to deepen our understanding on these issues shedding new light on the pros and cons of possible options for steering nature-based solutions into the climate mainstream. This debate will be one to watch as momentum gathers pace for positioning nature-based solutions as the key means through which we can make progress for both biodiversity and climate change in this critical year.

Ton Dassen works in the Department of Spatial Planning and Quality of the Local Environment at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and on the NATURVATION project.

Nature-based Solutions for Urban Resilience: Notes from Resilient Cities 2019

Lorna Winship — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 08:43:48 +0000

Over the past decade, increasingly frequent extreme weather events and natural disasters highlight the importance of cities being resilient to climate change. Meanwhile, pioneers’ campaigns and efforts in promoting sustainable urban development have reverberated across the globe. There is now a clear consensus that our cities need to be more resilient.

Against this background, political leaders, practitioners and researchers gathered in Bonn to discuss how exactly to build urban resilience, by exchanging experience and knowledge, seeking and building partnerships, introducing new techniques, and putting forward new demands that involve social well-being and justice.

One major approach of constructing a resilient city, and more broadly, addressing sustainable challenges globally, is through nature-based solutions. However, to integrate nature-based solutions in current urban planning, cities are encountering a series of common challenges and problems, such as difficulties in green-grey integration, barriers in involving different stakeholders, lack of expertise in the field and/or little investment or ownership for implementing and sustaining nature-based solutions.

Within the NATURVATION project, work has been undertaken to support cites with knowledge and tools required to realize the potential of nature-based solutions. This knowledge and tools focused on taking action for urban nature were brought to Resilient Cities 2019, and were shared and further discussed with city representatives, practitioners and researchers from around the globe.

We started by sharing NATURVATION’s findings at a peer-learning workshop held on June 24^th, which was joined by representatives from all of the Urban-Regional Innovation Partnerships (URIPs) – Newcastle, Malmö, Barcelona, Győr, Utrecht, and Leipzig – as well as other European cities and stakeholders (including Bologna, Bonn, Cascais, Genova, Lisbon, Milan, Strasbourg, Stockholm, Sumy, and Zagreb) to delve into the policy scenarios, governance strategies, business models, and citizen engagement for nature-based solutions.

Drawing on the Business Model Catalogue, Governance Solutions and Innovation Pathways Directory developed by the NATURVATION project, participants learned first-hand how to create inclusive business models and engaging citizens in the development of nature-based solution interventions. Following the interactive learning, participants then competed for designing a portfolio of nature-based solution interventions for the City of Győr, transforming a grey riverside square into a greenspace. Using the Urban Nature Atlas, participants identified successful nature-based solution cases that best matched the context and challenges of the selected project site, by developing a portfolio and enabling business model that could materialize the visions and design of the proposed nature-based solutions.

Learning by doing, this interactive workshop offered substantial take-aways for its participants. As Matija Vuger, the Head of Department for regional and international projects of the City of Zagreb, shared “today’s workshop brings new ideas, techs and sources, and puts on the table a lot of new solutions which can be implemented in the planning processes of the cities.”

The peer-learning workshop was followed by a full day of discussion sessions and training workshops around nature-based solutions in the European Urban Resilience Forum on June 25^th.

Co-organizing a panel session with ICLEI, the NATURVATION team worked with city representatives and stakeholders to explore the enablers and barriers of collaboration for nature-based solutions. Several questions were addressed during the interactive session, including: What are successful examples of transversal collaboration? How do collaborative approaches enable developing common values, visions and resources? How can collaboration within/beyond municipal departments contribute to mainstreaming NBS?

City representatives as well as NATURVATION researchers shared their experiences in collaboration and discussed the key elements and strategic methods for fostering partnerships in implementing nature-based solutions.

This was highly appreciated by participants, such as Andrea Muno-Lindenau from Wissenschaftsladen Bonn e.V. who highlighted: “I am really happy to be here because there are a lot of people that are already on their way to make cities more resilient. The striking points of this session are the co-creation, engagement of people, collaboration and transdisciplinary approaches that are very useful and helpful. This type of session motivates me to continue with this kind of work.”

Whilst the NATURVATION project is mainly engaged at the European level, it is important to note that nature-based solutions and urban resilience are global practices. On June 28th, NATURVATION researchers Laszlo Pinter (Central European University), Matthew Bach (ICLEI European Secretariat), Attila Katona (Central European University) and Björn Wickenberg (Lund University) were joined by Jessica Kavonic (ICLEI Africa Secretariat), Nian She (Tsinghua University Innovation Center), and Guilherme Cavalcanti (AREIS) to form a panel of the Resilient Cities congress that explored global actions on nature-based solutions. By introducing specific urban cases from five countries on five continents, namely Winnipeg (Canada), Malmö (Sweden), Lilongwe (Malawi), Zhuhai (China), and Recife (Brazil), the panel discussion provided a global picture of how nature-based solutions live up to their promise as a force for making cities more resilient and sustainable.

As the record-setting heatwave gradually passed in Bonn, the Resilient Cities 2019 came to an end. However, heated discussion will continue, as will the actions taken by cities to work and thrive with nature. And, NATURVATION will continue to provide cities with the resources and knowledge they need to be a part of the solution.

Linjun Xie is a Researcher at Durham University working on the NATURVATION project

The dense, but green, city

Lorna Winship — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 13:19:54 +0000

Swedish cities are grappling with a puzzle: how do you build dense, but green, cities? Urban density is helping Sweden pursue decarbonization to address climate change, but it also creates new challenges related to urban greening. While green space plays important roles in dense cities, it can easily be outcompeted and paved over as pressure on urban space increases.

Sweden has committed to carbon neutrality by 2045 and aims to become one of the world’s first fossil free welfare countries. Some cities in Sweden are aiming to hit the target even sooner. Stockholm, for example, aims to become fossil-fuel free by 2040. Cities are taking different pathways to reach urban carbon neutrality, but they will all need to tackle the same basic facets of urban development: where people live, how people get around, what kinds of energy powers the city, what kind of industry is allowed, and what people consume. Increasing the density of urban development is one key way to put cities on more sustainable footing.

But, dense cities have fierce competition for land use. Areas around public transit hubs, for example, will be targeted for housing development in order to get more people using sustainable forms of transportation, which might conflict with goals to preserve green space in the area. At the same time, nature-based solutions offer benefits particularly well-suited to dense development in Sweden, such as lessening the urban heat island effect, managing stormwater to reduce flooding, and providing recreation opportunities to urban dwellers. Nature is an essential part of a climate changed city.

A dense, but green, approach to cities will mean finding ways to accommodate nature-based solutions into high-density development. There are various models of compact urban development and research has found that some offer more access to nature than others. In addition, designing the same piece of land to play multiple roles mean that it is not necessarily optimized for any one of them, but instead offers a balance between them. Swedish cities are finding that this means that, as projects are developed in cities, discussions about trade-offs between different sustainability goals are even more important. Nature-based solutions can be a helpful concept to navigate the conflicts between density and urban greening since it is fundamentally about addressing multiple sustainability challenges at once.

As more and more cities pursue zero-carbon, climate resilient development, it will be increasingly important to understand how to pursue dense, but green, pathways.

Laura Tozer is a Researcher at Durham University working on the NATURVATION project.

How urban partnerships can drive nature-based innovation

Lorna Winship — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:00:32 +0000

For the past three years, ICLEI has been coordinating Urban-Regional Innovation Partnerships, or URIPs, as part of the Naturvation project, which aims of creating a step-change in how nature-based solutions are understood and used for sustainable urbanisation.

These collaborative processes in 6 European cities (Barcelona, Utrecht, Leipzig, Malmö, Győr and Newcastle) are convened by local authorities and researchers, and bring together strategic urban governance actors to bridge knowledge between research, policy and practice.

After doing a deep mapping of their local contexts in 2017, throughout 2018 the URIPs developed visions for how nature-based solutions can contribute to their local sustainability challenges, and sought to put these into practice through roadmaps, identifying windows of opportunity and effective forms of intervention.

The URIPs have also been co-developing cutting-edge tools from the project, such as:

The Urban Nature Atlas, the world’s largest database of nature-based solutions with over 1,000 cases worldwide
The Naturvation Index to evaluate nature-based solutions projects and identify how they contribute to sustainability goals

During the process, the local platforms have engaged with the topics most befitting of their local circumstances, amongst others:

Barcelona explored environmental justice, human health/well-being, (urban) nature and public health, social inclusion
Utrecht delved into climate adaptation, biodiversity and densification to achieve a dense and green city
Newcastle dug deeper into water management, flood risk, health, land use and urban regeneration

And there is much more to come!

This year, the URIPs will be in the spotlight throughout an entire week of global workshops, forums and conferences in Bonn, where they will share their experiences and support other cities to integrate nature-based solutions into their plans and policies. The key moment will be a peer-to-peer learning workshop for over 20 European local governments.

In the autumn, the URIPs will also be hosting Community Events, which will share their work with the broader public and encourage citizens across Europe to support urban nature.

The NATURVATION Urban-Regional Innovation Partnerships have grown into a vibrant community of practice to explore and co-create nature-based solutions across Europe.

Collectively, they are helping to limit the impacts of climate change, enhance biodiversity and improve environmental quality, while also contributing to economic activity and social well-being.