Aug 22, 2024
Restoring urban streams to promote Biodiversity, Climate adaptation and to improve quality of life in cities – EU-Project ReBioClim lauched
Social-integrated solutions for urban stream restoration will promote biodiversity, adaptation to climate change and improve quality of life in cities.
Urban streams have become increasingly invisible: over-built, channelised and degraded by anthropogenic use. In times of global warming, declining biodiversity and continued pressures of urbanisation, it is the moment to reconsider the role and quality of urban streams. Creating green and blue corridors not only significantly contributes to building climate-resilient cities by improving microclimatic conditions in overheated cities or providing fresh air corridors, it also connects stream reaches, provides floral and faunal habitats, as well as recreational spaces that improve human well-being.
However, restorations in urban areas with nature-based solutions (NBS) face many barriers and challenges: lack of space in intensively built-up areas, property rights of surrounding land, funding, different stakeholder interests, acceptance, and flood risk protection. Biodiversity in these stream areas is often perceived as the least urgent of the problems.
To face these challenges, it is necessary to perform an integrated analysis of ecology, stakeholder interests, institutional frameworks, social perspectives and urban space requirements.
ReBioClim will identify and analyse the current urban challenges and opportunities from different perspectives and extract the trade-offs between the social and ecological requirements in the context of urban planning and institutional settings. This will enable us to develop social-ecologically integrated solutions for urban multifunctional areas that provide ecosystem services and promote biodiversity whilst meeting the demands of the Water Framework Directive and considering urban planning.
To integrate, test and refine the results from our analyses and modelling activities, we place a series of stakeholder co-design workshops, restoration plans and initial restoration activities as pilot actions at the core of our project.
With a transdisciplinary, participatory and integrated approach we want to foster biodiversity, climate adaptation, citizens well-being and quality of urban environment by
improving the planning, the application and the management of nature-based solutions in restoring urban streams and strengthen the sustainable provision of ecosystem services provided by (peri-) urban streams. Participatory methods to create social-integrated solutions will ensure that urban transformations will be socially acceptable and sustainable.
ReBioClim is funded by the Interreg Central Europe Programme.
For more information visit the project website
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