Nature4Cities

Problem Addressed
This solution was sourced in response to UKGBC’s Innovation Challenge: “How can communities and local authorities implement, maintain, and assess the impact of nature-based solutions to enhance climate resilience?”
Nature4Cities seeks to tackle a range of urban challenges by bringing nature back into innovation, planning and implementation driven thinking. The platform was created for knowledge diffusion and assessment for re-naturing cities. The project seeks improve interactions between civil society, economic activities, public governance and the natural environment, which can currently be at odds with each other.
Verification & Case Study
The solution can be measured in the module called “NBS project assessment”. In this module it is possible to evaluate an NBS in several ways:
- It is possible to evaluate the urban performance of an NBS by measuring its surroundings in situ, for instance the Annual Carbon Sequestration, a Biotope Area Factor, a thermal comfort score, a thermal load score, etc.
- It is also possible to do a socio-economic assessment by estimating the socio-economic benefits, co-benefits and costs of a NBS project.
- An environmental assessment can be done to assess the impact of the NBS during its entire lifecycle ex situ.
Case Study: The functionality of the solution has been tested on several case studies. However Nature4Cities did not use it in real conditions to make decisions – the main objective was to test the tool itself. For instance in Alcalá de Henares with the Edible Forest:
- This project aimed to increase the biodiversity of peri-urban spaces by re-naturalising through the creation of an edible forest
- Nature4Cities has considered the baseline, the current state of the edible forest (2020) and 2 future scenarios for 2025 and measured several indicators for each scenario to compare them and measure the benefit of the NBS improvement.
Related
NATURE Tool

EcoservR

ENVI-met

The EM|Path Approach
