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Greek cities face rising temperatures and dry conditions, making effective urban green infrastructure management essential for climate change adaptation. Integrated strategies with specific guidelines improve resilience to extreme weather while promoting community sustainability.

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Key Learnings

  • Embrace Urban Green Infrastructure: Prioritizing urban green areas unlocks nature’s potential and supports combatting climate change and enhancing urban resilience.
  • Adopt Integrated Management and enhance collaboration: Using a coordinated management strategy, involving stakeholders and community members ensures effective design and maintenance of green areas.
  • Invest in Data-Driven Decision Making: Implement robust data collection and monitoring systems to assess the impact of urban green areas. Standardised indicators help make informed decisions for sustainable management.
  • Leverage Multi-Benefit Solutions: Urban green areas provide a range of benefits. Therefore, promoting urban green infrastructure as essential assets can significantly improve the quality of life while also tackling climate challenges.

About the Region

Amarousion (Marousi) is a municipality of the prefecture of Attiki, located 12 km northeast of Athens. It has a population of 71,830 inhabitants. Whilst Amarousion has the largest urban forest of Athens, the Alsos Syngrou, most of its urban green infrastructure, including parks and other open areas, roadsides, islet sections and unused public spaces, is sparse.

Heraklion is the largest city of Crete and the capital of the region. It is the island’s trading, economic and scientific centre with a municipal population of 179,302 inhabitants and 211,370 in its wider metropolitan area. The municipality of Heraklion is the fourth largest city in Greece. Urban green infrastructure comprises sparse and small-sized areas. For example, only two green spaces cover more than one hectare each.

Climate Threats

The climate in Greek cities is characterised by extremely warm and dry summers. Cities experience almost zero precipitation, enhancing the water stress of natural ecosystems and urban vegetation. Compared with previous decades, annual temperatures continue to increase, and dry conditions prevail across the country. While coastal areas and high-altitude mountainous regions are affected, the greatest impact is felt in urban areas. Cities are warmer compared to their surroundings and this is called the urban heat island effect. This phenomenon is recognised worldwide, but citizens in the Mediterranean, such as in Greece, are particularly suffering from its effects. Urban green spaces and their vegetation offer promising solutions to adapt cities to these impacts of climate change. Green spaces are the most effective tool to regulate urban climate, providing multiple benefits and important ecological services to local communities.

Urban Green Area Management

There are many ways in which cities can tackle climate change, including greening public spaces. Increasing the vegetation in urban areas can help reduce the urban heat island effect and its associated impacts, providing natural cooling. Trees and plants provide shade, reduce surface temperatures through evapotranspiration, and improve air quality by absorbing pollutants. Additionally, urban green spaces contribute to flood prevention during heavy rain due to their water infiltration capacity. By incorporating vegetation into urban planning and development, cities can improve their overall climate resilience and enhance the well-being of their residents.

Therefore, specific urban adaptation strategies are needed to make cities more resilient. In this context, experts see green areas and green infrastructure as the most broadly applicable, economically viable and practical tools to adapt to the effects of climate change. However, when the greening of cities is not coordinated/ managed in an integrated way, this can cause problems in effectively supporting climate change adaptation. This issue has led to messy vegetation establishment, unsuitable species selection, treatments and measures without standards, resulting in inadequate ecosystem services provision and costly maintenance.

In Greece, the LIFE GrIn project addresses these challenges, and the project team developed tools to facilitate climate change adaptation in the Greek pilot regions of Amarousion and Heraklion. As managing urban green areas is necessary for applying sustainable and climate-effective short-, mid-, and long-term resilience to cities, the project team integrated strategic management plans for urban green areas into adaptation plans. To do so, the LIFE GrIn project team proposed to follow the steps of the Urban Adaptation Support Tool (UAST):

Monitoring and Evaluation of Urban Green Areas

Limited information exists on how to use urban green areas for climate adaptation in cities due to a lack of data on their amount and quality. To address this, better data collection, evaluation, and monitoring methods on urban green areas are needed, and more information about their impact on the urban ecosystem is required.

The LIFE GrIn project team developed criteria and an indicator system that addresses the needs of urban ecosystems. This system supports the governance, decision-making, and management of urban green spaces in a comprehensive and standardised manner.

The indicators are grouped by categories, including:

  • Urban green typology:  The typology and the analysis of the urban green areas provide the required information to assess the city's adaptation level to ecological and environmental conditions.
  • Urban green composition and structure: Urban green spaces form a mosaic of different-sized areas with distinctive vegetation and structure. These characteristics reflect historical changes in urban development and urban green areas management policies and methods. Additionally, the benefits urban green areas provide are directly or indirectly related to these features.
  • Urban green phenotype: This summarises the observable characteristics and traits of the vegetation within the urban ecosystem, focusing on its unique features and adaptations shaped by urban conditions.
  • Biodiversity and alien species occurrence are crucial for providing information on the ecological balance, stability and functionality of the ecosystem mechanisms.
  • Landscape analysis indicators show the degree of fragmentation of the urban green areas, their dispersion, connectivity and general spatial distribution within the city.
  • Carbon storage by the vegetation of urban green areas is crucial for climate change adaptation as it helps reduce CO2 levels. It is calculated through allometric equations, according to the plant species and the climate zone.
  • Bioindicators from systematic sampling enable the evaluation of lepidoptera-occurrence.
  • Bioclimatic indicators allow the evaluation of a person’s thermal comfort (or discomfort).
  • Socio-economic indicators represent metrics used to gauge the level of well-being or quality of life within urban areas.
  • Evaluation and self-evaluation indicators primarily set a reference point and monitor the success of implementing the management plan.

Development of a cooperation platform and registry of urban green infrastructure

Effective management is essential to optimising the benefits of urban green infrastructure. This requires comprehensive information and data about urban green areas, which are currently lacking or disorganised in Greece. As part of the LIFE Grin project, a national registry of urban green areas was established to systematically collect and organise this information in each municipality. The pilot phase of this registry was implemented in Maroussi and Heraklion.

Managed by the Ministry of Environment and Energy, the information collected concerns:

  • Quantity and type of urban green areas
  • Quantity and quality of woody vegetation
  • Use and mapping of urban green areas
  • Management and maintenance practices
  • Ecological and social value of urban green infrastructure

This tool helps municipalities gather and organise data while aiding central services in monitoring, optimising existing infrastructure, assessing trends, identifying data gaps, budgeting, and raising citizen awareness.

Programmes like LIFE GrIn enhance the role of municipalities and cities in addressing climate change by fostering cohesive green projects that are integrated within a broader strategic framework, rather than isolated interventions.

Nikos Gialitakis, Deputy Mayor of the Municipality of Heraklion (2024)

Summary

The LIFE GrIn project integrates urban green areas into the urban ecosystem, recognising their role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. It aims to streamline local climate governance with a sustainable policy for managing, monitoring, and evaluating these areas through collaborative planning and best practices. Aligning with EU climate goals, the project enhances urban resilience and public values. Strategic management plans were developed for pilot regions in Amarousion and Heraklion, resulting in two new model green areas per municipality. The project's key achievement is the upcoming enactment of the policy as state law by the Ministry of Environment and Energy.

Further Information

The work presented in this adaptation story is part of the LIFE GrIn project.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s LIFE programme under grant agreement LIFE17GIC/GR/000029 – LIFE GrIn.

The beneficiaries of the project include the Institute of Mediterranean Forest Ecosystems and Forest Products Technology (Coordinator), HOMEOTECH Co., Ministry of Environment and Energy – Directorate General of Forests and Forest Environment, Central Union of Greek Municipalities (KEDE), and the Municipalities of Amarousion (Athens) and Heraklion (Crete).

Contact

Name: Aimilia Kontogianni – Forester – Environmentalist, PhD

Organisation: Homeotech Co.

Email: aimbkon.homeo@gmail.com

Keywords

Climate Impacts

Extreme Temperatures, Flooding, Water Scarcity

Adaptation Sectors

Biodiversity, Urban

Key Community Systems

Critical Infrastructure, Ecosystems and Nature Based Solutions, Health and Wellbeing

Countries

Greece

Funding Programme

LIFE - Environment and climate action

Disclaimer
The contents and links to third-party items on this Mission webpage are developed by the MIP4Adapt team led by Ricardo, under contract CINEA/2022/OP/0013/SI2.884597 funded by the European Union and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, CINEA, or those of the European Environment Agency (EEA) as host of the Climate-ADAPT Platform. Neither the European Union nor CINEA nor the EEA accepts responsibility or liability arising out of or in connection with the information on these pages.

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