URBAN BIODIVERSITY: IF YOU CAN’T MEASURE IT, YOU CAN’T FINANCE IT
“The impact of Cities on Nature extends far beyond their borders, driven by demand of the urban population and supply chains for commodities,” says Rogier van der Berg, Global Director of the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.
During COP15 in 2022, with the Global Biodiversity Framework, the strategic role of urban centers in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation was officially recognized.
“Cities have an important role in reestablishing the link to nature,” said van der Berg, “for too long we built cities too unpleasant and unhealthy to live in.”
At COP16 Biodiversity this year, in addition to taking stock of the implementation status of the Accord for the protection and restoration of biodiversity, multi-level governance strategies and concrete actions to integrate biodiversity into policy decisions were discussed. At the Cities Summit, an official parallel event to the Convention held in Cali on October 26th, it was clear that cities are part of the problem (accounting for 70% of emissions and 75% of resource use globally) as well as the solution. Local governments and cities can help achieve the goal of protecting 30% of land and marine areas by 2030 (the so-called 30×30) through sustainable mobility policies to improve air quality, water management that reintroduces water into its natural cycle, promoting low-impact markets, improving waste management and reintegrating nature into the urban fabric. “Nature underpins our livelihoods and very existence. It is integral to the effective functioning and wellbeing of urban communities,” said Kobie Brand, Deputy Secretary General of ICLEI. However, to advance these ambitions, it is necessary to close the biodiversity finance gap, a key aspect of climate finance that will continue to be discussed in the coming weeks at the COP on Climate in Baku.
Significant progress has been made in the design and implementation of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) to re-naturalize cities over the past decades. However, these often remain punctual and localized interventions, insufficient to consolidate the green-blue infrastructure as a fundamental axis of the ever-expanding urban system. While solutions are not lacking, our cities still need innovative decision support and evaluation tools to fully integrate these solutions into their planning processes, bridging the gap between local ambitions (such as regulatory plans) and large-scale climate governance directives. “Nature holds immense potential to transform our world, yet nature-based solutions remain underfunded,” said Mirey Atallah, Chief of UNEP’s Adaptation and Resilience Branch. “While US$7 trillion flow towards activities harmful to nature, only US$200 billion support nature-based solutions, and not enough is directed to cities.”
“Nature has immense potential to transform our world, yet nature-based solutions remain underfunded,” said Mirey Atallah, Head of the Adaptation and Resilience Division at UNEP. “While USD 7 trillion flows into nature-damaging activities, only USD 200 billion supports nature-based solutions, and an even smaller fraction goes to cities”.
The major struggle in financing adaptation strategies lies in the lack of a universally recognized and applied monitoring and evaluation system for them, as is the case for mitigation, where the impact is calculated in terms of avoided emissions, a quantifiable numerical value. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (and therefore finance it), to adapt the famous phrase of management guru Peter Drucker. But why is it so complex to measure the progress of adaptation strategies? First, there is the difficulty in identifying the cause-effect relationship between adaptation actions and climate risks reduction. It is not always possible to scientifically demonstrate whether an intervention is an adaptation or an urban development strategy; for example, a new wastewater collection system can be considered both an adaptation and a development intervention. In general, all adaptation actions lead to the development of the area, but not vice versa.
Another obstacle is that adaptation actions are local (context-specific although retaining a certain scalability and replicability), while the climate crisis is global. This makes it difficult to demonstrate a correlation between urban policies in more developed areas and climate disasters that impact the most vulnerable from a socio-economic point of view, a discussion that is linked to climate justice. Furthermore, variations in the climatic and geographical context require different solutions and measurement methods, highlighting once again the need for a globally agreed system of indicators. Assessing the impact of a strategy also requires data that demand multi-sectoral efforts, difficult to obtain with traditional monitoring tools and often not disclosable outside local public bodies.
The results of adaptation strategies have very long timescales (as in the case of tree growth), often exceeding political mandates or the timing of funding projects. Furthermore, solutions must adapt to continuously changing scenarios (both climatic and administrative). For this reason, adaptation is defined more as a pathway than a target and must retain a certain intrinsic flexibility. Finally, the current system of measuring strategies to contrast the climate crisis is based on avoided impacts (in the context of mitigation, on avoided emissions), and it is not always possible to make scientific predictions on what could have happened if that adaptation action had not been implemented.
Re-integrating nature into the urban fabric is not just a question of aesthetics. A greater orientation of global finance towards NBS, with dedicated financial mechanisms, adequate capacity and data, can help reduce the environmental impact of cities, promoting greater urban resilience, the restoration of habitats at a global level, the reduction of pollution and heat waves, as specified in the Report on the State of Finance for Nature in Cities, released by UNEP during the working day.
Article and photo by Caterina Vetrugno, Volunteer of the Italian Climate Network and expert in Urban Resilience