EU: COproductioN with NaturE for City Transitioning, INnovation and Governance (CONNECTING Nature)

Connecting Nature is a five-year project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Innovation Action Programme. The aim by project end is to position Europe as a global leader in the innovation and implementation of nature-based solutions. The main idea is “to innovate with nature to build climate resilience in cities”.
Key Challenges: The most major and urgent challenges occur today in cities. Among them are challenges such as rapid climate and environmental change, complex water and waste management, adverse health and well-being, changes in social cohesion and migration patterns. Nature-based solutions can provide an entry point to addressing these challenges.
While the benefits of nature-based solutions are clear and can directly address the challenges outlined, the development and implementation of nature-based solutions has been slow, uneven and, in many cases complex; requiring efforts across many disciplines. Issues like “silo thinking”, managing social cohesion and tackling the deficit of knowledge that exists around nature-based solutions need to be confronted when developing plans to introduce nature-based solutions in cities.
CONNECTING Nature has taken these challenges on board and will devise and test approaches using multi-disciplinary methods where solutions are designed and created collaboratively that will lead towards the creation of resilient, greener, healthier cities, leading to a more sustainable living for their citizens.