Abstract
Green infrastructure (GI) has been identified as a promising approach to help cities adapt to climate change through the provision of multiple ecosystem services. However, GI contributions to urban resilience will not be realized until it is more fully mainstreamed in the built environment and design professions. Here, we interrogate five key challenges for the effective implementation of GI: (1) design standards; (2) regulatory pathways; (3) socio-economic considerations; (4) financeability; and (5) innovation. Methods include a literature review, case studies, and interviews with resilience managers. We propose a people-centred and context-dependent approach to advance effective implementation of GI in urban planning. We highlight two underlying currents that run across all of the challenges – (1) the role of political will as a pre-condition for tackling all challenges holistically; and (2) the role of stakeholder engagement in achieving public support, harnessing funding, and maintaining and monitoring GI in the long term.Highlights:• The effective implementation of GI is context-specific and should adhere to the basic principles of appropriate technology.• Continuous community engagement is needed to ensure the inclusivity and multi-functionality of GI.• Challenges to successful GI are intersectional and therefore cannot be addressed singly in isolation.
Highlights
Cities and their inhabitants around the world are becoming more vulnerable as a consequence of rapid urbanization combined with climate change impacts (Petroski 2016)
We focused on urban Green infrastructure (GI)
The socioeconomic and innovation challenges of urban resilience have been identified by Ahern (2011), and Gould and Lewis (2016), who suggest that the lack of attention to social inclusion in GI programmes risks visiting a form of what they call “green gentrification” on cities
Summary
Cities and their inhabitants around the world are becoming more vulnerable as a consequence of rapid urbanization combined with climate change impacts (Petroski 2016). Resilience is increasingly understood as a fundamentally dynamic property of complex socio-technical systems: “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow, no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience” (100 Resilient Cities 2018) Since this type of resilience clearly depends on nature-based, as well as other, solutions, city managers need to consider how they may improve resilience through nature-based solutions that optimise the ecosystem services potentially available to a greater or lesser degree in all cities. Though flooding is often a driver of GI uptake, other drivers include droughts (France, India), acid mine drainage (South Africa) and safety of poorer communities (Brazil, India)
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