PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Urban design has on average fallen short of being sustainable or climate resilient. The challenge for city planning is to shift nature-negative practices to nature-positive solutions that restore ecosystems and enhance resilience. However, incentives for municipalities to make this transition remain weak, while the public sector is often limited to acting within its own buildings and properties rather than driving systemic, city-wide change.
Individual inhabitants struggle to see how greening their own homes or gardens could yield a perceptible improvement of the local microclimate or environment.
Transforming cities beyond public buildings requires coordination with private property owners who manage much of the urban fabric. As interests of stakeholders differ, progress appears to be slow and fragmented. A bottom-up strategy, starting at a neighbourhood level, can be more effective.
In order to transform cities and to get all stakeholders on board, the individual and differing interests of its residents need to be aligned through approaches that balance costs and benefits. These creative mechanisms will deliver clear value to those benefitting directly from measurable improvements, as well as to investors or to those financing necessary investment.
OBJECTIVES
Nature-based solutions (NBS) cannot be implemented by individuals - they require collective action at the level of a neighbourhood or urban quarter. The main challenge lies in identifying shared goals and a common roadmap.
LIFEImpaQt demonstrates a standardisable, replicable process, involvingtwo cities of very different sizes: Melk (Austria), with 5,000 inhabitantsand Berlin-Charlottenburg (Germany) with 130,000. In each city, ImpaQt will guide a neighbourhood though a holistic and co-creative approach to set up a suitable structure and to achieve climate resilience in the two urban quarters.
Agreement is only part of the process – securing financing is another. Urban transformation at scale requires engagement with the financial sector to scale up. LIFE ImpaQt explores how NBS can be linked with sustainable investment instruments, such as environmental or climate impact bonds.
To make this link operational, LIFE ImpaQt will develop a standardised quantification of a project’s environmental and climate effects (through indicators) and tie them to repayment terms of impact bonds. This mechanism enables those who benefit directly from improved microclimate and environmental quality to help repay those who provided the initial investment.
RESULTS
- Successful demonstration of co-created interventions towards climate-resilient urban transformation in two pilot sites (Melk and Berlin).
- Viable governance models that bridge silos between municipal departments, citizens, and businesses, ensuring systemic and participatory decision-making.
- A framework of solid indicators (environmental, social, and economic) to monitor, assess and prove the benefits of climate-resilient interventions.
- Proof that above effects can be linked with innovative financing mechanisms to support the uptake of city transformation.
- Comprehensive toolbox on ImpaQt planning, financing, and co –creation.
- Guidelines, capacity-building activities, and dissemination strategies to enable other European cities to adopt the ImpaQt approach.
- Broad dissemination via identified networks such as European Federation of Green Roof Associations (EFB), “Climate change adaptation regions” (KLAR!), and “Connecting Nature-based Enterprises Platform” (CNEP) to foster the ImpaQt replication and “nature-positive” practices of enterprises and projects.
- Scientific exploitation via university curricula and research, conferences and publication.