🌿 REGREEN Project Summary: Fostering Nature-Based Solutions
The REGREEN project aimed to foster Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) for smart, green, and healthy urban transitions in Europe and China. The project focused on generating knowledge, developing tools, consolidating business models, and promoting awareness of NbS to address urban challenges like public health pressures, inequalities, and climate change vulnerability.
🎯 Overall Objectives and Insights
REGREEN worked along four main objectives:
- Knowledge Generation: Produce evidence on the benefits of NbS.
- Tools Development: Create and test tools to guide the design and planning of NbS.
- Business Models: Consolidate business and investment models for sustainable NbS implementation.
- Awareness Promotion: Foster awareness in education, governance, and planning.
Key insights for accelerating the transition to equitable, healthy cities include integrating cities with research organizations, involving children, creating enabling funding conditions, breaking silos, and ensuring transparency in sustainable investments.
💡 Main Results and Outputs
The project produced substantial academic and practical outputs, including 34 peer-reviewed articles (with 29 more in progress) and the comprehensive REGREEN Transition Handbook.
Urban Living Labs (ULLs)
Central to the project were Urban Living Labs in both regions:
- Europe: Aarhus (Denmark), Velika Gorica (Croatia), Paris Region (France).
- China: Beijing, Shanghai, Ningbo. These labs catalyzed strategic shifts in planning and capacity building, securing mandates for further NbS exploration.
Tools and Methodologies
- Education: Developed interactive tools like walkable floormaps, citizen science projects for biodiversity, and digital educational tools for children from kindergarten to youth.
- Planning & De-paving: Created approaches to reduce urban land take and tools to identify de-paving potential and re-greening strategies.
- Modelling: Developed six improved ecosystem models to calculate benefits related to air/noise pollution, urban heat islands, and water flow, integrated into the City Explorer Toolkit for Aarhus.
Business and Decision Support
REGREEN elaborated an overall approach for sustainable business models, including public-private, consultancy-driven, and citizen-driven models. A Decision Support Tool was also launched to guide stakeholders through the NbS process.
🚀 Impact and Innovation
REGREEN advanced the state-of-the-art by demonstrating the importance of understanding NbS benefits from multiple perspectives and taking a complex systems thinking approach.
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Explorează
- Urban-Rural Resilience: Explored the role of NbS in enhancing resilience by focusing on “peoplesheds” within the larger context of watersheds and airsheds.
- Typology and Evidence: Developed an internally consistent typology of NbS backed by evidence for the ecosystem services they provide.
- Mapping: Created tools for high-resolution land-cover/land-use mapping and scenarios up to 2030.
