Informing planning

City planners are encouraged to incorporate urban green and blue spaces, which provide multiple benefits to city dwellers. Planners and developers are increasingly required to meet green infrastructure targets. For instance, in the UK, the Green Infrastructure Framework is designed to increase the amount of green cover to 40% in urban residential areas and support the Environmental Improvement Plan's commitment to facilitate public access to green space and water. We can provide evidence-based solutions to meet these targets.

CAPABILITY:

Planning urban blue and
green spaces

Green and blue spaces such as parks, trees, gardens, ponds, rivers and lakes play a vital role in urban lifestyles. For example, trees can reduce air pollution, provide cooling on a hot day, and reduce surface water flooding, as well as store carbon and support biodiversity. Using a range of tools and models, we work with partners to help them assess where best to implement these spaces.

CASE STUDY:

Assessing the benefits of blue and green spaces across four continents

UKCEH worked with partners to assess ecosystem services provided by urban green and blue spaces in five cities from four different continents – Dhaka City, Kigali, Zomba, Medellin, and Leicester. The results of the assessments showed that despite similar levels of urban green and blue infrastructure, the benefits they provided differed substantially. This study underlined the importance of considering multiple factors when making decisions about where to place new urban green and blue infrastructure, and not just placing it where the pressure is most severe.

TOOLKIT:

City Explorer Toolkit

The City Explorer Toolkit is an interactive web-based tool, which helps planners to understand where best to create urban green and blue spaces like parks and ponds, to ensure that benefits such as cooling on a hot day, improved air quality, and noise reduction are received by the people who need them most.

The tool uses models and spatial data to calculate the benefits of different green infrastructure and nature-based solutions to tackle challenges in cities such as heatwaves, air pollution and flood risk. It also uses population and social data to work out which groups of people will benefit most from a particular option.

The toolkit can be used to:

Explore population, social and pressure datasets to see where the need is greatest.
Run models that calculate the benefits of current green and blue space.
View maps of ‘potential’ for users to plan the best locations for new green and blue space.
Visualize and download summary information.