Understanding collaborative governance of biodiversity-inclusive urban planning: Methodological approach and benchmarking results for urban nature plans in 10 European cities

Biodiversity Knowledge Centre

The Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) team just published a new paper in the journal Urban Ecosystems to support the monitoring of the EU Biodiversity Strategy (EU BDS) regarding target 14 on urban greening plans for cities over 20,000 inhabitants.

This work was initiated because the KCBD team flagged that no indicator was available to track progress towards EU BDS target 14 "Cities with at least 20,000 inhabitants should develop an ambitious urban greening plan".

The paper proposes an analytical framework to evaluate the ambition level of urban greening plans based on criteria related to urban biodiversity goals and targets, collaborative governance, institutional support, public participation, financing mechanisms, and monitoring and evaluation. The framework was then applied to evaluate the ambition level of urban greening plans in 10 European cities. Only 4 out of the 10 cities performed well across all criteria. Collaborative governance, financing mechanisms and monitoring and evaluation are the three main criteria that cities could improve to raise the ambition level of their urban greening plans.

Should this analytical framework be applied to the ca 600 cities with at least 20,000 inhabitants in the EU, it could feed an indicator to monitor EU BDS target 14.

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Originally Published \| Last Updated	16 Jan 2025 \| 17 Jan 2025
Related organisation(s)	JRC - Joint Research Centre EC - European Commission
Knowledge service \| Metadata	Biodiversity Knowledge Centre \| Nature-based solutions Biodiversity and finance Biodiversity conservation
Digital Europa Thesaurus (DET)	biodiversity ecosystem services urban habitat urban planning nature-based solutions nature restoration environmental protection EU policy UN convention Indicator environmental monitoring governance financing green investment research regional cooperation Climate change mitigation adaptation to climate change Impact Assessment environmental impact
Geographic coverage	European Union EU

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