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05/07/2022

How to overcome barriers to planning for integrated sustainable infrastructure and promoting cross-sectoral collaboration?

Review of the Insight Session - Planning for sustainable infrastructure: Institutional barriers to cross-sectoral collaboration

[Translate to English:] Foto: metamorworks | Shutterstock

Between the 19th of May and the 8th of June 2022, Connective Cities organized three multi-session dialogues that addressed the overarching question of ‘How to overcome barriers to planning for integrated sustainable infrastructure and promoting cross-sectoral collaboration?’ The relevance of this miniseries arose, due to the underrepresentation of sustainable infrastructure on global, regional and national policy agendas despite the increasing environmental, social and economic challenges that cities are facing. Therefore, Connective Cities mobilized central actors that are essential stakeholders in the planning processes for sustainable infrastructure in cities to an initial exchange series on Participatory, Innovative and Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Decision Making, that can inspire central actors to overcome the implementation gap of green infrastructure in cities.

Session 1: Institutional barriers to cross-sectoral collaboration

The first session of the ‘Planning for sustainable infrastructure’ series on the 19th of May started with Vanessa Bauer (from the Sustainable Infrastructure program at GIZ), who talked about the importance and need for more sustainable infrastructures in cities. She presented to the participants ‘The Solutions Lab – Skalierbare Lösungen für eine nachhaltige Infrastruktur’, which aims at bringing different perspectives together, such as those from business, academia, policy making and the civil society. The Solution Lab also ensures the inclusion of sustainable considerations at the pre-project level through integrated, upstream planning.

 
The session also included a presentation by Dr. Ani Melkonyan-Gottschalk (from the Center for logistics and traffic in Duisburg) on an innovative and collaborative decision-making framework for integrated sustainable urban policy design. The project ‘New Mobility in Metropolitan areas’ (NEMO) addresses cities’ central role in driving climate change and its urban climate features by inter-sectoral integration of stakeholders in participative governance as well as the development of four models. The NEMO simulation helps in identifying the suitability of each model to the city under focus.

As a closing, Sharon Gil (Programme Management Officer Cities Unit/Economy Division at UNEP) focused on investing in nature-based solutions (NBS) in cities, such as sustainable urban drainage systems, large urban parks, green roofs and urban gardening. She highlighted the challenges especially for smaller and mid-sized cities to pursue funding for NBS and to have enough space for implementation, but she also offers insightful recommendations, inspiring stories to mainstream NBS at scale and its multiple, cross-cutting and holistic benefits.

Session 2: Nature-based-solutions for risk informed urban development planning and sustainable infrastructure

The second session, which took place on the 3rd of June 2022, focuesed on discussing different risks to which cities and their critical infrastructures are exposed to. The session included a guided exchange on different measures e.g. nature based solutions (NBS) for reducing public and private infrastructures vulnerability. The aim of the session was to provide a forum for increased agenda coordination for sustainable development as well as resource efficiceny in the implementation of development & cooperation measures.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Jachnow (from the Institute for Hoursing and Urban Developmen Studies) informed the audience first about the background, definitions and key elements of (urban) resilience, while moving towards the question ‘How to achieve resilience (via planning)’ ? He dealt with different types of resilience, such as environmental, economic and social resilience and dived deeper into the global vision of how to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Dr. Johannes Belle (Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa),  talked about the different categories of NBS approaches, such as ecosystem restoration and protection and infrastructure-related approaches, and demonstrated the interconnectedness of nature and people in order to sustain a healthy ecosystem. He pointed towards an interlaced model for ecosystem management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction, the international trend towards NBS and its compelling benefits.

The 3rd speaker was Mr. Dirk Kurbger,from the Emschergenossenschaft and Lippeverband (EGLV), who demonstrated nature based solutions typologies for flood prevention and how green infrastructure may secure development gains and prevent disasters. Through a comparative demonstartion of water management and design as well as flood retention measures and decentral rainwater management, he showcased the examples from the EGLV and the Lake Phoenix in Dortmund and compared nature-based solutions to technical solutions.

Session 3: Green infrastructure – Guidance & recommendations for overcoming the implementation gap in cities

In the final session on the 8th of June 2022, Connective Cities in partnership with NetworkNature organized an event that focused on the main barriers of green infrastructure implementation. The session aimed at highlighting best practices and experience of European and international cities in overcoming these barriers, as well as introducing the audience to available guidance and resources.

The session started with some opening remarks from Daphne Gross-Jansen (Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development-BMZ) about how to take good decisions on infrastructure and the importance to plan ahead for barriers and to connect country to country partnership to local level. “You cannot have one without the other. You cannot have social development without economic development. And you cannot protect the environment without feeding the people.”

Part 1 of this two-hours session illustrated experiences and good practices for design, implementation, planning and governance of urban green infrastructures (UGI) in cities as well as city experiences in overcoming barriers to actually design, implement and governance of UGI’s. Bettina Wilk (Senior officer at ICLEI) introduced the key barriers for implementing UGI in cities & peri-urban areas, such as political factors and organizational & institutional factors. The developed recommendations for urban greening plans are among others to include participation strategies for all relevant actors, action-oriented and comprehensive implementation plan with clear targets, timeliness, and responsibilities. To that end, Gabriel Dias Mangolini Neves (Environmental Engineer, Campinas-Brazil) showed a successful example of NBS integration as part of city planning that connected fragment green spaces and led to life improvement in the city. In addition, Eddy Chikuta (Coordinator of project, Lusaka Water Security Initiative) talked more in-depth about the water security through the lens of multi-stakeholder collaboration in order to limit the challenges that arise due to fast growing cities and the lack of coordination between stakeholders.

During the second part of the session Monica A. Altamirano (NOW Partners) and Faith Ka Shun Chan (University of Nottingham Ningbo, China), presented China’s Sponge City Program, the four main types of NBS implementation and addressed questions to its audience such as ‘What are suitable/fit for purpose green financing mechanism that are particularly suitable for NBS/Urban Green Plans in the Global South?` Finally, Laura Wendling (Nature-based Solutions Research team Leader at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland) presented the NBS indicator handbook, which serves as a guide to development and implementation of scientifically valid monitoring and evaluation plans for the evaluation of NBS impacts. It furthermore provides a brief description of each method, along with guidance about the appropriateness, advantages and drawbacks of each in different contexts. She concluded her presentation with illustrating examples, principles that guide indicator selection and the need of cooperation, shared vision and values, trust, commitment and dissemination to build community and ecosystem resilience and sustainability.

For more information about this miniseries, you can watch the recordings of the sessions on our CC Platform and download the presentations of the respective sessions.

Stay tuned for upcoming events in our Platform Community.


Author:
Carina Krause, Connective Cities


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