Sub-project 2

Blue-green urban transformations

Solutions for multifunctionality and resilience

Photo: T. Hametner, UFZ Blue-green infrastructure – street greenery, parks, green roofs and facades, etc. – positively affect human health and wellbeing. They help us to sustainably adapt urban areas to risks such as climate change, and they promote biodiversity. Blue-green infrastructure delivers a range of ecosystem services, consequently enabling the development of nature-based solutions for a range of challenges. In parallel, they are subject to different, partly diverging interests. Co-creation, and the involvement of various stakeholders should thus be core of blue-green infrastructure development.

Our sub-project "Blue-green urban Transformations" aims at developing solutions for resilient, sustainable, innovative blue-green infrastructure. From development and design to application, financing, governance, and societal acceptance, we aim at providing solutions for planers and policy-makers.

To do so, we cooperate with other projects within UFZ, with other research instutions, and with partners from policy and practice.

Tasks

Our tasks comprise:

• Analysing, developing, and applying multifunctional blue-green infrastructure adapated to today's and future challenges
• Investigating how blue-green infrastructure can best provide multiple ecosystem services
• Identifying barriers, conflicts, and paradoxes in the application of blue-green infrastructure, and providing solutions for solving them
• Identifying core stakeholders as well as societal and political processes that affect blue-green infrastructure, and suggesting optimised ways of governance

Projects

Projects, we are contributing to or which we coordinate:

• Fact Check Biodiversity with sub-project on urban areas
• Helmholtz Climate Initiative with sub-project Urban Systems
• KoopLab − Participation through Cooperative Open Space Development. Collaborating to Develop “Arrival Neighborhoods”
• Leipziger BlauGrün
• Ostpartnerschaften
• Perceptions on Nature-based solutions in flood contexts
• RECONECT
• REGREEN
• KlimaKonform/RegIKlim with sub-project on green infrastructure on municipal level

Contact

Dr. Sonja Knapp, Department of Community Ecology, and Dr. Diana Dushkova, Deptartment of Urban and Environmental Sociology