🌿 GREEN SURGE Project Summary: Green Infrastructure and Urban Biodiversity
The GREEN SURGE project aimed to identify, develop, and test ways of linking urban green spaces, biodiversity, people, and the green economy to tackle major urban challenges like land-use conflicts, climate change adaptation, demographic changes, and public health.
It provided an evidence base for Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI) planning and implementation, focusing on better linking environmental, social, and economic ecosystem services (ESS) with local communities.
🎯 Main Project Objectives & Achievements
The project addressed three interlinked objectives through an innovative, three-tiered, transdisciplinary approach.
1. Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI) Planning and ESS
- Multifunctional UGI: Identified key elements of multifunctional UGI (e.g., parks, woodlands, green roofs, “blue” elements, community gardens) and provided evidence on the diverse ESS and benefits they generate.
- Supply and Demand: Assessed the balances and imbalances between supply and demand of ESS in different cities and urban areas across Europe.
- Good Practice: Assessed the implementation of UGI planning in practice to identify and transfer strategic approaches.
2. Biocultural Diversity (BCD) and Governance
- Conceptual Framework: Developed a conceptual framework of BCD for the urban context, which is an innovative approach to UGI planning and governance.
- Socio-Ecological Integration: Examined how residents with different cultural backgrounds and socio-economic situations value, use, and help maintain urban green spaces, supported by a field survey of ~3,800 people in the Urban Learning Labs.
- Innovative Governance: Focused on developing governance arrangements that integrate participatory (bottom-up) approaches with planning (top-down) approaches to facilitate local engagement.
3. Valuation and Green Economy Integration
- Integrated Valuation: Developed a multi-criteria evaluation framework—a “do-it-yourself” guideline—to assess and integrate monetary and non-monetary values of ESS and biodiversity.
- Market Integration: Identified mechanisms for unlocking cash flows from urban green spaces and evaluated existing instruments, with a focus on integrating ESS into real economies.
- Innovative Methods: Applied innovative methods like hedonic pricing models to analyze relationships between property prices and different qualitative aspects of green spaces.
🛠️ Methodology (Three-Tiered Approach)
The project utilized a comprehensive three-tiered approach and Learning Alliances (LAs) for shared learning and stakeholder involvement in situations of high complexity.
| Tier | Focus | Scope and Cities |
| Tier 1 | Comparative Analysis | Pan-European analysis of 20 functional urban areas to establish an evidence base on UGI planning, governance, and BCD linkages. |
| Tier 2 | Good Practices | In-depth study and synthesis of innovative approaches on UGI planning, governance, valuation, and market integration. |
| Tier 3 | Urban Learning Labs (ULLs) | Application and testing of guidelines, methods, and approaches in a real-world setting, using the Learning Alliance approach in five cities: Bari, Berlin, Edinburgh, Ljubljana, and Malmö. |
📚 Dissemination and Legacy
- Handbook: Produced the “Urban green infrastructure: connecting people and nature for sustainable cities” Handbook (D1.3), a collection of policy briefs, factsheets, and guidelines for planners, policy-makers, and practitioners.
- Dissemination: The project provided recommendations for policy makers, UGI planners, citizens, NGOs, and business actors to promote the creation and management of high-quality green spaces.
