UrbanGaia
ERA Learn2020: Managing urban biodiversity and green infrastructure to increase city resilience
PARCEIROS:
INSTITUTO POLITÉCNICO DE COIMBRA, PORTUGAL (COORDINATOR)
HELMHOLTZ-CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH, GERMANY
MYKOLAS ROMERIS UNIVERSITY, LITHUANIA
RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR NATURE AND FOREST, BELGIUM
UNIVERSITY OF MÁLAGA, SPAIN
FINANCIAMENTO:
Investimento Global Elegível: €
Apoio da União Europeia: Incentivo Não Reembolsável FCT: €
Investimento elegível IPC: 107.236,00 €
INVESTIGADOR RESPONSÁVEL IPC:
ANTÓNIO JOSÉ DINIS FERREIRA (ESAC)
FINANCIAMENTO:
Investimento Elegível: €
Apoio da União Europeia:
Incentivo Não Reembolsável (85,5%): €
Comparticipação dos promotores (14,5%): €
Investimento elegível IPC: 107.236,00 €
DESCRIÇÃO SUMÁRIA:
More than half of the global population is living in cities, and this number is increasing. The need for resilient and healthy ecosystems, fostering biodiversity and maintain human wellbeing under different future scenarios is particularly pressing in urban contexts where the highest population densities are coinciding with highest environmental impacts. Urbanisation and increase of built surfaces are main drivers for fragmentation, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss in Europe. Urbanisation provokes fragmentation and degradation: ecological connectivity and ecosystem condition (quantity as well as quality) are heavily affected especially in urbanized areas. This decreases ecological resilience, ecosystem functioning and biodiversity, in turn affecting the supply of ecosystem services and all potential well-being benefits related to it.
Cities are highly complex socio-ecological systems, and the needs and desires to improve well-being are highly variable within and between cities and through time. The demand for – and use of – ecosystem services is therefore equally diverse and context-dependent, and transdisciplinary approaches are required to capture this complexity and be able to scale up findings to higher spatial and institutional levels.
Green-Blue Infrastructures (GBI), ranging from technological solutions with an ecological component to entirely nature-based solutions, are hypothesised to increase ecological connectivity and quality, improve biodiversity and functioning, deliver multiple ecosystem services and direct improvements of human wellbeing. Moreover, GBI have an indirect well-being effect by mitigating the negative urbanisation cascade.
UrbanGaia will contribute to the ecological and social-economic knowledge base on critical features of GBIs, and provide tools for guiding their evaluation, establishment and management. Applying an innovative two-way approach of scientific mobilisation and high-tech citizen science and spatial data mobilisation on the one hand, and on the other the transdisciplinary valuation, co-creation, guidance and project development by a range of existing GBI initiative stakeholders, UrbanGaia will be able to push the scientific frontier forward and draw much-needed lessons on effective implementation of GBI.
Período de execução:
Data de início: 01/03/2017
Data de fim: 29/02/2020