EURESFO 2022 in Athens, Greece

27-04-2023 / hannes.schwaiger

Transition Workshop at EURESFO 2022 in Athens, Greece

The Transition Workshop was held at the 9th European Resilience Forum (EURESFO), hosted by the Municipality of Athens, and organised by ICLEI, on the 15th of September 2022. It brought together more than 60 stakeholders from 20 cities. The programme of the Transition Workshop was developed in consultation with REGREEN’s project partners and external stakeholders to ensure the outcomes would be tailored to the needs of practitioners. Local government officials and practitioners that participated in the Transition Workshop had three key recommendations to mainstream NBS:

  • Mainstreaming NBS into Urban Living Labs requires meaningful collaboration and engagement across cities and practitioners.
  • Demonstrating the benefits of NBS and quantifying its value can help to get buy‐in from public and private partners.
  • Collecting quality data and setting quality indicators is essential to measure the benefits of NBS for resilient urban transitions.

 

Impressions from Transition workshop, credit: ICLEI

Some of the key messages coming out this session on how cities and regions can move towards nature positive pathways are as follows:

  • Mainstreaming NBS into Urban Living Labs requires meaningful collaboration and the engagement across cities and practitioners:
    • Be inclusive and do not work in silos. The walkable floor maps can be considered as an interactive tool to support both governance and education.
    • Integrated NBS design co-creation processes for educational activities in collaboration with academia has proven to be a good practice. This project has been replicated in three schools in Piraeus city in addition to Aarhus, Paris and Velika Gorica. Moreover, the city of Piraeus, received the floor map as a gesture and inspiration for their future work with the co-design of NbS.
    • To achieve a meaningful collaboration among different city departments to work together on NBS, it is crucial to change the governance of NBS in cities and build capacity to the local authorities.
    • Informal settings would provide the space and the opportunity for the different stakeholders to exchange on planning, policy and governance issues.
  • Demonstrating the benefits of NBS and quantifying its value can help get buy-in from public and private partners:
    • The best way to get officials on-board in utilising NBS is to show them implemented NBS projects onsite and tangible results.
    • The public is generally more interested in the non-monetary values of NBS, but the final hurdle is getting the funders on-board, and they need monetary figures.
    • Non-monetary, participatory approaches are essential in order to capture full range of benefits. Without them, NBS is undervalued.
  • Collecting quality data and setting quality indicators is essential to measuring benefits of NBS for resilient urban transitions:
    • Temporal and spatial resolution of data is important when choosing the appropriate model for NBS projects. There is a big number of data, but the quality of data can prove challenging.
    • Identify quality indicators to measure how NBS contributes to biodiversity.
    • Simplify the indicators so information can be communicated easily to the relevant audience(s).

For more information please read the workshop report, available here.