Leading global organisations launch major initiative to connect cities with nature

On 20 June 2018, at the ICLEI World Congress in Montreal, Canada, three highly respected global organisations launched a unique initiative that recognizes and enhances the value of nature in and around cities across the world.

Called CitiesWithNature, this exciting initiative builds on previous international programs and significant experience and expertise of the founding partners – ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

CitiesWithNature is a global platform for cities and other subnational governments, their communities and experts to connect, share and learn from each other in mainstreaming nature into our cities in ways that benefit both people and nature.

“Now, more than ever, we need to reconnect with nature, to plan, build and manage our cities with nature! ICLEI and its partners are proud to present this shared global ambition, which aims to enable a growing number of cities and partners to come on board and collaborate,” says Councillor Cathy Oke, ICLEI’s incoming First Vice President. “I am also particularly excited that my city, Melbourne, has already joined CitiesWithNature as one of its pioneer cities.”

The initiative is open to all cities and subnational governments, regardless of size or level of progress in working with nature. It is structured in such a way that cities can decide how involved they want to be. The more actively they engage and contribute, the more benefits they will receive. There is no fee associated with joining CitiesWithNature. Initially, a commitment, along with some basic information, is all that is needed to register and start participating.

Each city that joins CitiesWithNature will be invited and assisted, through an online Registry, to share its policies, plans, commitments, actions and results related to nature and the services of ecosystems. This will become a powerful resource where cities can connect, share, learn from and inspire each other to accelerate actions and raise ambitions.

“Nature isn’t a luxury, it’s a critical piece of the solution as cities grow and face the impacts of a changing climate,” says Pascal Mittermaier, Global Managing Director for Cities at The Nature Conservancy. “Giving municipal leaders the tools they need to make the case for nature in their communities will help make cities greener, more resilient, truly thriving places for all of us.”

“Cities can benefit tremendously from strengthening the connection with their natural surroundings – this will improve quality of life, ensure the sustainable provision of food, energy and drinking water and create climate resilience. CitiesWithNature offers new opportunities to learn from the best experiences in the world to create cities that are in balance with nature,” says Chantal van Ham, EU Programme Manager Nature Based Solutions, IUCN.

The CitiesWithNature Knowledge and Research Hub will be a “meeting place” and online resource library for practitioners, researchers and other experts, both public and private, to engage and contribute to emerging practices and scientific thinking related to nature in, and surrounding, cities and other urban spaces.

The CitiesWithNature Community Hub will be co-created via social media. It will be open and freely available to anyone from any city in the world to share their experiences, photos, video clips and stories about nature in cities.

For more information and updates, please visit https://www.citieswithnature.org/ or follow on Twitter @CitiesWNature.

View our introductory video below or here (best viewed in HD).

The concept of ecosystem services or ‘nature’s benefits’ recognizes that the natural environment provides many critical and free services that contribute directly to human wellbeing and livelihoods. However, defining the spatial location of the areas that generate these benefits in order to mainstream them into planning frameworks remains a challenge in many cities of the global south.

The INTERACT-Bio project team used ‘natural asset mapping’ to identify and define the location of key ecosystem services in the nine project cities across Brazil, India and Tanzania. As a common baseline, high-resolution remotely sensed spatial data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 mission was captured during 2017 for each of the nine project cities. The project team worked closely with service providers GeoTerraImage to develop landcover classes that highlight areas which provide ecosystem services, such as wetlands, mangroves, grasslands and woody vegetation. This analysis resulted in a detailed spatial dataset that defines 12 different classes of landcover and can be used to generate a variety of mapping outputs and analytics for all three project countries.

In Tanzania, the ICLEI Africa INTERACT-Bio project team and UFZ technical support team worked closely with city partners to identify desired project outcomes as part of the project scoping exercise in 2017. A priority voiced by the Dar es Salaam city leadership was the need to identify and protect dwindling green open spaces within the city, to offset overexploitation of natural resources such as indigenous trees, and to mitigate some of the impacts of climate change such as the urban heat island effect.

To address this need, the INTERACT-Bio project team utilized a ‘thematic atlas’ approach to combine data and information generated from the remote natural asset mapping process with local spatial data, scientific studies and input from Tanzanian experts and city officials. The result, which is in the final stages of development, is a compendium of thematic maps and explanatory text that ‘make the case’ for the importance of green open space in Dar es Salaam. In addition to highlighting the status quo of ecosystem services in the city, the atlas provides good-practice policy responses and management interventions, towards aiding decision-makers in prolonging and maximising the benefits to citizens of green open spaces.

In line with their diverse contexts, the Brazilian and Indian INTERACT-Bio teams have adopted different spatial methodologies to mainstream biodiversity into planning and decision-making. These are however based on the same baseline methodology that was procured for natural asset mapping. This demonstrates the potential of combining customized earth observation data and information with input from local partners to aid city regions to make sustainable planning decisions.

Through co-production the thematic atlas on nature’s benefits, the INTERACT Bio project has produced a value-adding methodology and tool that can help cities make informed decisions about managing and investing in green open space and green and blue infrastructure. It can also help guide land use and development planning in a way that will enhance resilience and nature-based development. And it supports cities in building the case for investment in green space based on nature’s benefits (ecosystem services) and urban resilience considerations.

The INTERACT-Bio project is supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) through the International Climate Initiative (IKI).

Read more: www.international-climate-initiative.com