Urban areas face critical challenges driven by accelerating climate change, increased air pollution, and more frequent and intense extreme heat events. Green infrastructures such as urban agriculture, greenhouse rooftops, parks, gardens and urban forests can potentially make cities more resilient to climate change and more sustainable in terms of water management, food production, air quality, human well-being and biodiversity. The objective of the ERC Consolidator project URBAG is to find out how urban green infrastructures can be most efficient in contributing to urban sustainability by evaluating which combinations of urban, peri-urban agriculture and green spaces result in the best performance in terms of local and global environmental impact. URBAG provides the evidence-based knowledge needed to shift urban planning from fragmented fixes to integrated, adaptive, and multifunctional green infrastructure solutions that safeguard public well-being and ecological integrity.
The project has developed novel and comprehensive analysis to integrate the life cycle impacts of the resources required for green infrastructures with the understanding of how green infrastructures impact the urban land-atmosphere interaction. This multidisciplinary analysis of green infrastructures is timely and urgent as various cities are currently implementing green infrastructures in various forms despite there being very little quantitative knowledge as to which infrastructure strategies are most effective in promoting food production, air quality and temperature comfort while reducing environmental impact and protecting social vulnerabilities.
The investigation, connecting processes between the natural, the socio-institutional, and the built environment developed a novel, comprehensive analytical framework with three specific aims:
1. System Integration: Move beyond planning silos by integrating environmental impacts (via Life Cycle Assessment), urban resource use (optimizing the food-energy-water nexus), and atmospheric interactions (air quality and temperature regulation).
2. Multiscale Assessment: Identify GI combinations that maximize urban benefits while minimizing negative impacts, assessed at both the local scale (e.g. reducing neighborhood heat stress) and the broader scale (e.g. global climate impact of material sourcing).
3. Actionable Guidance: Provide municipal planners and policymakers with validated tools and evidence-based recommendations to design sustainable GI strategies and avoid unintended consequences, culminating in the "Green Infrastructures - A Guide for city planners and policy makers."
