Nature4Cities - Assessment tools for NbS projects

To minimise the difficulties often,met by municipalities when choosing indicators, support can come from the development of new tools linked to NbS. For example, Nature4Cities aims to provide access to a simplified online urban NbS assessment tool, where it is possible to create and assess urban NbS project scenarios. More specifically, the work carried out by N4C partners on assessment consisted of selecting a panel of indicators to measure NbS performance with reference to each defined urban challenge, with a reflection on the choice criteria for indicators: they had to be easy, credible, accepted, and robust, making it possibile to measure challenges at different scales. The project partners have also tested existing assessment models linked to the selected indicators. Those tools have been simplified and integrated into a unique toolbox, to make scientists’ methods accessible to a wider audience. The heart of the Nature4Cities platform is therefore the NbS assessment tool, allowing users to predict the environmental, socio-economic and urban development impacts of the selected/generated NbS. It is composed of three main tools described bellow.

• Assess the urban benefits that your NbS will bring with our Simplified Urban Assessment Tool

Are you an urban planner, decision-maker or do you provide technical support, and you’d like to see how the chosen NbS will impact the local environment? The Simplified Urban Assessment Tool (SUAT) can help you to define the proper conditions to execute and develop your NbS project to maximise its benefits.

This is built from 3 components: GreenPass, Colouree and the Expert Model-based Box (EMBB). Together these can assess different aspects of climate, environment and social urban challenges, at different scales, from object to city scale. The visualisation of project site assessments and related good practices represents an important resource for use in the planning phase, and can be shared amongst multiple involved stakeholders.

• Assess the environmental impact of you NbS project with our Life-Cycle Analysis and Urban Flows tools

Are you are an urban planner, a decision-maker, an environmental expert or a consultant, and you’d like to decrease the negative environmental impact of the further design stages of your NbS project?

The Nature4Cities Platform provides a tool for environmental assessment, combining a material flow analysis tool and a Simplified LCA tool.

Based on environmental indicators (e.g. impact on climate change or urban metabolism), and using some of your project data, the tool automatically calculates the corresponding metrics relating to the environmental performance of the NbS.

Using this tool, you can obtain easy-to-understand graphical representations of the different environmental impacts at each step of the life cycle of your NbS.

• Assess the NbS socio-economic impacts of your NbS project with NBenefit$ and EQOL-scale

Are you a policy maker, an urban planner, or a built environment professional and you’d like to estimate the socio-economic benefits, co-benefits and costs of your NbS project?

NBenefit$ allows estimation of the costs and benefits of the project’s financial and social impact by quantifying and comparing the costs of the planned NbS, as well as the benefits associated with the provision of multiple Ecosystem Services, over the entire life cycle of the NbS.

Our quality-of-life scale (EQOL-scale) goes further by assessing the social impact of the project. It allows you to assess users’ satisfaction (averaged or for specific users) related to your planned NbS.

You can also measure the effectiveness of your NbS post-implementation by comparison with environmental quality of life pre-implementation.

This tool was developed in the scope of the project Nature4Cities. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 730468