Climate-proof landscape through renaturing urban areas in Central Europe

Despite the highly differentiated biogeographical areas in CE, urban areas face similar challenges. Growing urban sprawl turns green into grey areas, leaving the urban areas more prone to the adverse effects of extreme weather events and climate change, intensifying the effects and occurrence of urban heat islands and urban floods, and leading to air pollution, health challenges, biodiversity loss, and growth in energy demand.



GreenScape CE paves a way for integrating nature-based solutions (NBS) and green infrastructure (GI) in the grey infrastructure in 5 CE urban areas, significantly affected by aggravating urban heat island effect: Milano Metropolitan Area, Ptuj, Szegedin, Warsaw and Zagreb through peer-to-peer learning, transnational capacity building and participatory decision-making.



GreenScape CE will utilize the initiated transnational cooperation between 33 organisations to jointly develop 5 NBS/GI action plans, followed by 3 pilot actions using 3 jointly developed solutions, and 2 CE-wide strategies. The main beneficiaries of the project results are local governments and citizens. Both groups will benefit from know-how exchange, strengthened multi-level governance, tailored capacity building events, as well as the initiated NBS pilot actions that contribute to the well-being and social inclusion.



These results will be accomplished through the transnational cooperation of 12 PPs (AT, HR, HU, IT, PL, SI). Together they will promote structural cooperation between public authorities and stakeholders and work on strengthening capacities for holistic and efficient planning of GI. The GreenScape CE results will support the development of NBS projects beyond the pilot areas through active engagement of potential replicator cities during the project and disseminating findings to improve policy learning. Transnational collaboration is essential for the exchange of knowledge and ideas that will lead to mainstreaming climate resilience solutions in urban areas.To support local governments in participatory planning and developing Action plans related to the implementation of NBS in CE countries that will trigger pilot actions in five countries.

To jointly develop and implement 3 NBS local pilot actions that will lead to the development of a set of citizen co-creation, technical and funding solutions in order to capture multiple benefits of implementing NBS in urban areas.

To eliminate negative preconceptions of citizens about GI/NBS and advocate the urgency to connect single NBS projects into a coherent GI network to prevent further landscape fragmentation.