© Elise Järvenpää
Background
In 2019 the European Commission formulated the “European Green Deal”, a roadmap of key policies, legislative proposals, and strategies to implement sustainable energy transition. The overall goal of the Green Deal is to transform the EU into a modern, resource-efficient society with a competitive economy while tackling global environmental and climate related challenges. The EU biodiversity strategy 2030, embedded in the Green Deal framework, states that the promotion of healthy ecosystems, green infrastructures and nature-based solutions should be systematically integrated into urban planning. To achieve this, the strategy includes a proposal for cities with over 20,000 inhabitants to create urban greening plans. These plans aim to bring nature back into cities to support biodiversity and help mitigate climate change. The GreeningCities project will support municipalities to implement greening plans by providing knowledge of the EU biodiversity strategy's urban greening requirements and data.
GreeningCities goals
The main aim is to strengthen sustainability transformation in land use planning and green area management in cities and to get a high-society impact by helping to improve the quality of urban settings.
More specific goals of the project are:
- Clarify how EU level strategy targets should be streamlined into local level municipal decision-making.
- Deepen the knowledge gained in the VASU project of urban greening plans and related other plans or programs.
- Explore urban greening plans of different European/global cities
Methods and implementation
- Explore and review European guidance and mandates. How is the EU helping implementing the greening plans?
- Explore local level implementation of greening plans (gathering documents, semi-structured interviews)
- Explore urban greening plans from different cities across EU (Gathering documents, semi-structured interviews)
- Identify best practices and share information among Finnish municipalities
More information
Senior Researcher Laura Costadone, Finnish Environment Institute SYKE (firstname.lastname@syke.fi)