| Project Detail |
Nature-based solutions to protect urban freshwater ecosystemsCities worldwide face challenges such as climate change and urbanisation. Nature-based solutions foster sustainable development by addressing urban challenges. Despite being vital to urban sustainability, implementing nature-based solutions in the freshwater landscape remains unclear. The MSCA-funded StreamScape project analyses the impacts of urban streams, providing nature-based solutions for protecting water quality, reducing natural hazards, preserving biodiversity, and improving health and well-being. The project focuses on Aveiro and Coimbra to promote urban streams as solutions to mitigate the effects of urbanisation and climate change on aquatic ecosystems, human health. It will assess how urban development impacts urban streams ecosystem services and residents’ perception of the benefits.
Cities around the world are undergoing significant transformations and are facing substantial challenges in the form of urban of climate change and ongoing urbanisation. The idea that we can work with nature to improve our cities is now seen as vital. The concept of Nature-Based Solutions has emerged to foster sustainable development by transversally addressing social, economic, and environmental urban challenges. Although the attention to nature-based solutions inclusion is an important pillar of urban sustainability, a clear understanding how they can be implemented in the freshwater landscape, is still missing, even in face of the relevance of the urban freshwaters to wellbeing of the population. This investigation aims to fill this gap, by analysing the social and environmental impacts of urban streams as important nature-based solutions from protecting water quality to reducing natural hazards while preserving biodiversity and providing health and wellbeing benefits to population. By selecting as case studies Aveiro and Coimbra, the research project aims to promote the urban streams and their multiple ecosystem services as important nature-based solutions to mitigate the effects of urbanization and climate change on aquatic ecosystems, in the human health and in the wellbeing of the population. The project will adopt the research strategies: to assess how urban development affect a capacity of urban streams to provide ecosystem services using well-established scientific methods and investigate how the degradation of urban streams reflects on the local residents’ perception of the ecosystem services in terms of benefits, health and wellbeing. In addition, thematic maps of ecosystem services identified in the urban streams will be produced to demonstrate the relevance of urban streams for ecological, cultural and social aspects and to demonstrate can this information can be useful to urban planning and governance. |
