Green Cities for Climate and Water Resilience, Sustainable Economic Growth, Healthy Citizens and Environments (GrowGreen)

Making nature part of the urban living environment improves quality of life for all citizens, helps business to prosper, provides innovative and inspiring solutions to major urban challenges (such as flooding, heat stress, drought, poor air quality and unemployment) and helps biodiversity to flourish. GrowGreen aims to create climate and water resilient, healthy and livable cities by investing in nature-based solutions (NBS). Grow Green is a five-year project with the following objectives:

• Contribute to the evidence base of nature-based solutions in cities for cost-effective, replicable means of increasing urban climate and water resilience, social, environmental and economic benefits, to underpin the development of NBS policies and the global NBS market.
• Develop an easy-to-use replicable approach to support the development and implementation of NBS strategies in cities, aligned with existing city priorities.
• Support the creation of the required conditions to drive and enable the implementation of city NBS strategies by awareness raising and capacity building in cities around the world as well as supporting the development of the required policy framework, business models for investment in NBS and the global market for NBS.

Demonstration projects are designed and implemented in four Front-runner Cities: Manchester (UK), Valencia (Spain), Wroclaw (Poland) and Wuhan (China). This latter is a rapidly developing city and is part of the pilot phase of the Chinese Sponge Cities Programme. The project also developed a document with methodologies to guide municipalities in the process to:

• Identify their Natural Capital and adaptation assets; i.e. natural measures already adopted at local level that currently contribute to adaptation.
• Identify urban features and spaces that can potentially accommodate NBS.
• Establish priorities and concerted efforts on adaptation measures and actions in the most vulnerable areas and with greater deployment potential.
• Identify urban regeneration and new development areas that could accommodate NBS.
• Create synergies between current and future measures.

The Compendium of Nature-based and ‘grey’ solutions to address climate- and water-related problems in European cities produced within the GrowGreen project offers organized and comprehensive information on the availability and effectiveness of nature-based solutions and their grey counterparts for adaptation to climate change and addressing water-related challenges in urban areas.

ECCA 2021 - Climate Adaptation solutions video - GrowGreen