Fostering nature-based solutions for smart, green and healthy urban transitions in Europe and China

Project Information

REGREEN

Grant agreement ID: 821016

DOI

10.3030/821016

Project closed

EC signature date 3 May 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 29 February 2024

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Climate action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials

Total cost

€ 5 325 013,84

EU contribution

€ 4 996 171,84

Coordinated by

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - REGREEN (Fostering nature-based solutions for smart, green and healthy urban transitions in Europe and China)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Urban systems globally experience significant and interlinked societal challenges including pressures on public health and well-being and growing inequalities and social disruption. Urban systems are particularly vulnerable to impacts of climate change and suffer from degraded or lack of natural ecosystems to help alleviate these impacts.
A promising approach to deal with these challenges is to work with nature’s capacity and qualities in a sustainability perspective. Working with nature in urban settings has advantages over other approaches: multi-functionality, multi-benefits and cost-effectiveness. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are interventions that seek to restore, improve, enhance or conserve natural capital and biodiversity in terms of habitats or ecosystems.
REGREEN worked along four main objectives: 1) generate knowledge and evidence on benefits from NbS; 2) develop and test tools to guide, design and plan NbS, 3) consolidate business and investment models for NbS, and 4) promote awareness of NbS in education, governance and planning.
To accelerate the transition to equitable, healthy, and green cities in Europe and China, insights from REGREEN suggest: integrating cities and regions with research organizations and city networks; involving children in Nature-based Solutions (NbS); creating enabling conditions such as funding, breaking silos, fostering policy champions, and effective enforcement; engaging stakeholders in planning to facilitate NbS updates and collaboration; using rapid assessments and localized ecosystem service models; incorporating diverse evidence on people's experiences with NbS; and ensuring transparency, accountability, and clarity in sustainable investments for private entrepreneurs and investors.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

REGREEN had by the end of the project published 34 peer reviewed articles with additional 29 papers in preparation or submitted. An overview of the work performed in REGREEN is gathered in detail in the REGREEN Transition Handbook (1) and in the 12 REGREEN Policy briefs (2).
The complete output of REGREEN is permanently stored on https://www.zenodo.org/communities/regreen

(1) https://zenodo.org/records/11065278
(2) 10.5281/zenodo.10814036

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Urban Living Labs were at the centre of all REGREEN activities. In Europe, this involved two municipalities: Aarhus in Denmark, and Velika Gorica in Croatia, and one regional agency in the Paris region. In China, this involved Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo. The engagement of the cities served as a catalyst for strategic shifts in planning, capacity building, and wider stakeholder outreach. It has also secured the mandate for further exploring and implementing NbS. The engagement with cities played a crucial role in contextualising and providing insights across the different themes of REGREEN (3).
REGREEN explored NbS as co-creative educational processes from kindergarten to youth, developing and validating interactive walkable floormaps (4,5), citizen science on biodiversity for school children (6), play biotopes (7) and digital educational tools (8,9). REGREEN investigated enablers for local NbS implementation across the Urban Living Labs (10,11), developed new approaches to reducing urban land take, integrating NbS in planning systems (12) and developed a highly topical approach and tool to identify potential for de-paving and guidance on re-greening strategies in cities (13-16). REGREEN also explored the role of NbS on how to enhance urban-rural resilience, focusing on peoplesheds in the larger context of watersheds, airsheds, and naturesheds (17).
An internally consistent typology of NbS was developed, backed up by a summary of the evidence base for the ecosystem services that each NbS provides (18). Building on this typology, REGREEN developed different types of scenarios to represent NbS across the city for use with ecosystem service models to inform planning.
Tools and guidelines for mapping and modelling procedures were developed to allow for transferability and replicability (19) and mapped land-cover/land-use across spatial scales and over time at high resolution (20-22), enriched by land-cover scenarios until 2030 (23). REGREEN elaborated a typology of target values for various environmental pressures and developed a synthesis of cross-sectoral potential target values, incl. barriers and constraints in achieving them (24).
Six improved ecosystem models provide locally relevant calculations of benefits, taking into account local pressures, people who may benefit and the type of NbS. The models show how NbS can help reduce air and noise pollution (25), alleviate Urban Heat Islands (26), reduce water flow under extreme precipitation (27), improve water quality (28), and maintain or increase biodiversity. The models are integrated into the City Explorer Toolkit (29) for the city of Aarhus, Denmark.
REGREEN also demonstrated the importance of understanding NbS benefits to local communities from multiple perspectives (30) and has taken a complex system thinking approach (31,32), which can help strengthen arguments for the implementation of NbS and avoid sub-optimal or even harmful implementation.
Finally, REGREEN elaborated an overall approach for developing sustainable business models and three concrete business model approaches for inspiration including a public-private driven model, a commercially driven consultancy model and a citizen driven model (33). A Decision Support Tool gathers foundational knowledge and guides different types of stakeholders through the process of designing, implementing and delivering NbS (34).

(3) 10.5281/zenodo.10606133
(4) 10.5281/zenodo.10546289
(5) 10.5281/zenodo.10454324
(6) 10.5281/zenodo.10715659
(7) 10.5281/zenodo.10604288
(8) 10.5281/zenodo.10604430
(9) 10.5281/zenodo.10579162
(10) 10.1080/1523908X.2021.1956309
(11) 10.1057/s41599-023-02398-z
(12) 10.5281/zenodo.12580282
(13) 10.5281/zenodo.10730936
(14) 10.5281/zenodo.10731001
(15) 10.5281/zenodo.10732419
(16) 10.5281/zenodo.10732448
(17) 10.3390/land11040480
(18) 10.1016/j.nbsj.2022.100041
(19) 10.5281/zenodo.10607080
(20) 10.3390/rs13091744
(21) 10.5281/zenodo.7107514
(22) 10.5281/zenodo.5215792
(23) 10.3390/rs14143488
(24) 10.5281/zenodo.10466785
(25) 10.3390/su14127079
(26) 10.3390/atmos13071152
(27) 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104737
(28) 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119950 
(29) www.ceh.ac.uk/city-explorer
(30) 10.5281/zenodo.10576086
(31) 10.1002/sdr.1756
(32) 10.5751/ES-14013-280201
(33) 10.5281/zenodo.12581495
(34) www.nature-solutions.eu/decision-support-tool

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