Progressing Green Infrastructure in Europe

Abstract

The research is focused on the role of GI in supporting the development of a green economy and sustainable land, water and city management. Green Infrastructure is a network of natural and semi-natural spaces and is a broad concept and includes both natural and man-made features, such as parks, land and marine reserves, hedgerows, and wetlands, as well as green roofs, eco-ducts and cycle paths. Although GI has been studied for more than four decades in all countries, it is still a relatively new EU policy instrument and there is not a significant amount of focused research around it. With its multi-functionality, GI is a subject of interest to a variety of stakeholders, such as private business, planning authorities, scientists, the general public and a range of policymakers, with responsibilities ranging from local to a European level. European policy is nowadays acknowledging GI and a communication will be adopted by the EC this year. This presentation, aiming at contributing to the communication of GI potential and successful implementation, will give an overview of the state of the art of GI, including case-study recognition, and will outline questions which the author believe should be answered for GI to progress effectively in Europe. In particular, global competitive gains from GI at an economic, environmental and social level will be explored, and considerations on how multi-functionality can be integrated into methods for quantifying benefits and costs and valuing GI will be developed.

Environmental management of peri-urban natural resources: L’Horta de Valencia case study

“…If society wants to conserve the landscape in quality conditions as a green infrastructure for citizens [19], society must pay the added costs. Peri-urban space of L'Horta is not only an agricultural historical land, it is also a big open space for the enjoyment of citizens and a good landscape for rural tourism.…”

Combining the Conservation of Biodiversity with the Provision of Ecosystem Services in Urban Green Infrastructure Planning: Critical Features Arising from a Case Study in the Metropolitan Area of Rome

“…Since its adoption in 2013, the European GI Strategy has attracted great interest across EU Member States, stimulating the proposal, planning and implementation of a large number of GI projects at both the landscape and the local scale [3], with the latter involving above all urban and peri-urban areas [4][5][6][7]. Unlike landscape scale designs in rural settings, those conceived for local scale GI in urban contexts have been addressed mainly at enhancing the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and the cost-effectiveness of such interventions, while considering the health of ecosystems, i.e., biodiversity in its multiple aspects, just a secondary and/or approximate goal [5,8,9].…”

Implementing Green Infrastructure in Spatial Planning in Europe

“…Several policy themes complement GI. In the academic literature, three sectors or policy themes provide the greatest synergies with GI in Europe; 'biodiversity' [2,17], 'rural development and agriculture' [38][39][40] and 'urban development and green areas' [5,8,9,13,41,42]. In their policy analysis of 14 European countries, Davies and Lafortezza [1] report that four synergetic policy themes were prominent in national policies: social cohesion, green economy, biodiversity and health.…”

“…The land uses that conflict most in terms of habitat fragmentation with GI preservation and development are 'transport infrastructure', 'energy generation' and 'agricultural intensification' [5]. Continued low-intensity use of land for built up areas, commonly referred to as 'urban sprawl', is also fragmenting habitats and decreasing the amount of land that is not built on in Europe [15,43,44].…”

“…Interest in green infrastructure (GI) has grown in research, policy and planning in recent decades [1][2][3]. The central idea behind GI is the understanding of the physical non-built-up environment as an infrastructure capable of delivering a wide variety of benefits to society [4], including the ability to preserve biodiversity; to provide food, feed, fuel and fibre; to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to contribute to enhanced human health and quality of life [1,2,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Although no global definition has been agreed upon, the concept has a number of key components or ideas: connectivity (e.g., between green areas, non-built-up land and water), multifunctionality (e.g., areas that have multiple functions and social values tied to them) and "increased greenery" (e.g., the ambition to enhance the quantity and/or quality of green and blue areas) [3,[12][13][14][15].…”