Resource description:
The Green Cities Hub
Few organisations currently understand, measure or report their impact on nature. CircHive is a five-year, €11.5 million, Horizon Europe partnership project to research and develop rigorous and standardised methods for valuing biodiversity. The Green Cities Hub within the project explores opportunities for urban biodiversity monitoring and enhancement of nature in cities. Three cities have volunteered to be pilot sites to explore ways to overcome the barriers to successful monitoring and valuation of urban nature, and they will share their learnings with other cities around the world.
The Cities
Malaga in southern Spain, Mytilene, the capital of the Greek island of Lesbos, and the UK city of Edinburgh are the Green Cities Hub partners. Both the City of Edinburgh Council and the University of Edinburgh are case studies for the city, demonstrating local municipality and large organisational perspectives. Together, the case studies complement each other, as coastal cities and tourist destinations with rural countryside and urban green space. The wider CircHive project also explores standards development within a multitude of organisations: food production, biomaterials, retail and investment to test a wide range of approaches to biodiversity impact for business and place. The cities case studies are uniquely positioned to test the approaches developed by other CircHive project partners, and provide on-the-ground feedback to inform further research and progress.
The Methodologies
The two focus methodologies for data collection, analysis and reporting for the case studies are Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) and Biodiversity Footprinting (BF). NCA assigns a monetary value to the extent, condition and annual provision of environmental assets and ecosystems, such as woodland and wetlands, and the ecosystem services and benefits they provide, such as soil, fish, flood protection as well as oil, gas and water (ONS). Biodiversity Footprinting can quantify all the environmental impacts from an organisations’ actions across its supply chain. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model can calculate the emissions and resources used or generated at all stages of a product or service, from raw materials, production, use and waste. (Biodiversity Metrics.org). Both methods can help an organisation more accurately identify where and why its activities contribute to biodiversity decline and the financial value loss. By calculating the feasibility of implementing suitable restoration or mitigation actions, an organisation can then track the change created and contribute to achieving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets, possibly allowing it to save money and publish its positive impact.
The interviews
Recent interviews with the pilot leads highlighted the drivers for undertaking a biodiversity approach to ESG reporting. The leads shared the key focus areas for the pilots and identified the challenges and possible solutions. There are clear motivations for adding biodiversity reporting to mandatory carbon reporting and actions to achieve Net Zero targets. Not least that Natural Capital Accounting is more often required in projects with external funding, particularly in the UK. NCA helps to make a case for the value of nature whether by monetary value and/or by ecosystem service provision to secure investment, such as in the case of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in England. Although the pilot studies are at the beginning of the learning curve with regards to NCA, capacity building in this approach will allow cities to not only remain competitive with regards to accessing external funding and investment, but also to lead on and influence environmental and biodiversity issues.
Attracting investors and expanding investment portfolios is a key motivation and preserving existing nature and encouraging new nature will enhance the cities’ attractiveness to visitors, as well as improving wellbeing for citizens. Data collection and analysis does hold funding challenges, however. Mytilene for example is a small municipality with limited resources so planning capacity for long-term monitoring and anticipating consultancy fees is a concern. The city is establishing terrestrial natural capital accounts by compiling land satellite data on ecosystem extent and is making it possible to extract this data from the geographic information system (GIS) platform. Mytilene aims to concentrate all data in one place for easy access for the municipality, for environmental protection and water quality. They envision that the effects will be cascading – with positive effects for universities, citizens and the municipality.
Closing the legislation gap towards making reporting on biodiversity a requirement depends on standardised metrics, indicators and methodologies. The pilot studies, with support from the wider CircHive project, are working to develop these at a project level, ensuring that scaling up to a city level will be possible in the longer term. The University of Malaga has developed a study using the Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity to measure nature in the city, and all the pilots are working in close liaison with policy makers to build on existing programmes and inform new policy development, ensuring that systems set up now can respond to future requirements. Data generated now will provide valuable baselines to measure uplift and change over time, and inform flexible systems that can track and adjust how actions create impact.
Communicating impacts with citizens is a key element of the CircHive project research and tools are being explored to help residents understand the importance of nature, along with partnering with existing participatory opportunities for input through citizen science data collection. Sharing technical knowledge and new tools with professionals and students will be facilitated by an online platform for knowledge exchange and open discussion called the BEEHive. This platform will be developed throughout the duration of the CircHive project and will act as a significant output with a legacy extending beyond the five-year research phase.
Current activities and future plans for the cities are already starting to build the research foundation for managing their urban biodiversity. The city of Malaga is studying the effects of climate change on both terrestrial and marine biodiversity. They are working with an association of people to neutralize a waste deposit area as well as exploring ways to implement a new circular economy strategy. The city is a member of the first group of cities to sign the Covenant of Mayors with a mission towards Net Zero.
The University of Edinburgh has a goal of Net Zero by 2040 in scope one and two of its operations For the CircHive project so far, the main priority is on the Forest and Peatland Programme which involves woodland creation and peatland restoration and ways to monitor and report on biodiversity, to develop and adopt an internationally supported biodiversity metric. The Forest and Peatland Programme is focused on offsetting scope three carbon emissions by creating several thousand hectares of native woodland and restoring peatland habitats. This restoration will take place across university-owned land and, primarily, through partnerships with other landowners. The University is aiming to improve biodiversity at these locations as well as on campus supported by its research and teaching programmes with new, more ambitious goals on the way.
The University of Edinburgh is exploring how to improve the organisation’s biodiversity footprint through its procurement practices. A key challenge is that supply chains are not necessarily equipped to report on biodiversity impact yet, so the university is engaging with its wide variety of suppliers to assess future needs and potential methodologies for measuring and reporting across their networks. A similar element of Mytilene’s strategy is to avoid negative biodiversity impacts from any public works.
The City of Edinburgh Council targets include halting biodiversity loss by 2030, and their Nature Networks scheme is helping to achieve this. A target to reverse biodiversity loss by 2050 is embedded in visions, plans and the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy. The Council is setting KPIs for nature as well as further developing the use of Natural Capital Accounting.
Find out more about the ambitions of the CircHive Research project and sign up for the BEEHive discussion platform, soon to go live https://www.circhive.eu/beehive.
Zoom in to the diagram to discover the motivations, focus areas, challenges and solutions of biodiversity reporting and practice for cities.
Author/Contact:
CircHive Green Cities Hub