Intensifying climate extremes (floods, droughts and heat waves), combined with increasing urbanisation, call for a Blue Green urban paradigm to enhance cities’ adaptive capacity for changing climatic and demographic conditions.
To help urban planners and developers realise this paradigm, we have created the Blue Green Solutions Guide.
Why Blue Green Dream?
Quality of life in towns and cities is threatened by climate change. The growing risk of severe floods, droughts and heat waves endangers both human health and urban infrastructure and the problem is not going away – July 1st 2015 saw the UK experience its hottest day on record: with unseasonably temperatures seen across western Europe.
Furthermore, in many cities increasing urbanisation is also putting water and energy resources & utilities under ever greater strain. Action for urban climate change adaptation is vital.
The Blue Green Dream (BGD) paradigm calls for the rethinking of existing ways of planning, designing, constructing, operating and maintaining urban water (blue) systems and urban vegetated (green) areas. In particular, by conceiving them not as separate systems, as is often the case today, but in combination.
PhD Student Xi Liu on the green roof at Eastside, Imperial College London
The BGD project created a framework for synergising urban blue and green systems to provide effective, multifunctional Blue Green Solutions (BGS) to support urban adaptation to climatic change. Benefits of such solutions include: increased amenity and urban health, enhanced resilience to drought and flood risk, reduced air pollution, noise and energy requirements, mitigation of extreme heat and urban heat island effects and enhancement of biodiversity and quality of life.
The BGD project focused on the development of innovative paradigms, models, tools and methodologies by sharing expertise between Climate KIC, university researchers and consultancy partners based in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Taking an integrated approach, jointly developed pilot BG Solutions were tested and demonstrated in selected sites in Berlin, London, Paris and Rotterdam.
The pilot projects served to identify the measured benefits, associated costs, equipment needed, and policy/practical constraints of BG Solutions, with a view to facilitating replication of these projects at national and international levels.
Now, we have used the BG Solutions Framework developed by the Blue Green Dream project to produce the Blue Green Solutions Guide.
