BiodivERsA: Enabling Green And Blue Infrastructure Potential In Complex Social- Ecological Regions: A System Approach For Assessing Local Solutions (ENABLE)

Green and blue infrastructure (GBI)1 is now rapidly recognized throughout the world for its multifunctionality and its large potential to effectively address emerging global challenges. The unique multifunctionality results in that GBI may at the same time may deliver societal benefits while also supporting biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives. However, unlocking this multifunctional potential has been largely overlooked both in research, policy and planning and the underlying hypothesis of ENABLE is that unlocking the GBI potential will require the alignment of a large number of critical enabling factors (e.g. user rights, accessibility and structural position) many of which remain unstudied or even recognized. ENABLE aims to fill these gaps by utilizing a transdisciplinary systems2 approach to examine the fundamental relationships between social-ecological dynamics affecting GBI’s potential to meet multi-functional goals, including biodiversity conservation. This approach will: 1) identify the fundamental relationships between GBI, biodiversity and ecosystem services in urbanized regions, 2) improve the understanding of human perceptions and cultural values of GBI and biodiversity, 3) investigate barriers hindering equal access to GBI benefits, and 4) examine critical success factors to improve the analysis, design, management, conservation, performance and assessment of multiple benefits of GBI. Taking these factors into account, the objectives of ENABLE are 1) to advance the operational knowledge of how to set up a transdisciplinary approach to GBI in order to unlock its full potential and 2) to create an assessment framework and develop new analytical tools and approaches for evaluating GBI performance. Ultimately this contributes to secure a sustainable and resilient future for humans and biodiversity in dynamic human-dominated landscapes across Europe.