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The European Union is promoting green infrastructure, defined as “a network of natural and semi-natural areas and other environmental elements, strategically planned, designed and managed for the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services”, i.e. benefits brought by nature to society.

This set of areas is essential in the fight against climate change. Forests, grasslands, aquatic ecosystems and other ecosystems play a key role in the carbon cycle, but they also provide services and goods essential to human well-being. Green infrastructure contributes, among other functions, to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change, since among the services it provides is the sequestration and storage of carbon through the creation and conservation of natural sinks. It also contributes to the regulation of temperature, the supply of renewable energies, the channelling of the movements of species caused by climate change, the control of damage caused by catastrophes and extreme events (such as droughts, floods, etc.) and the reduction of vulnerability to forest fires, erosion and pests or diseases.

In this context, the objective of the INVERCLIMA project is to provide a spatial design of this network of ecosystems that pays special attention to climate change. To this end, this initiative has worked to identify the priority ecosystem services, evaluating the potential of the entire Galician territory to provide each of these services and, based on the results of the previous analyses, carry out the territorial planning of the green infrastructure. Throughout the process, the opinion of the population has been taken into account, so that it has been the citizens who have prioritized the environmental services that they considered most important and who have proposed areas for inclusion in the green infrastructure.

The general objective of the project has been to provide knowledge and a methodology for the spatial design of the green infrastructure of a territory integrating the response to climate change.

The specific objectives were as follows:

• Incorporate adaptation to climate change into territorial planning through the integration of green infrastructure into territorial plans.
• Facilitate the geographical delimitation of the green infrastructure of a territory.
• Consider the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity and ecological connectivity in the zoning of territorial planning instruments.
• Improve public participation in the design of green infrastructure for climate change adaptation.
• Properly manage the project and disseminate the results.

• Design of the Green Infrastructure of Galicia, comparing the result obtained with the determinations that are currently being prepared within the Green Infrastructure Strategy of Galicia and the State Strategy for Green Infrastructure and Ecological Connectivity and Restoration.
• Incorporation of the Green Infrastructure of Galicia in an Integrated Territorial Plan: firstly, it was analysed how to use the results of the assessment of ecosystem services (ES) to improve the territorial diagnosis of the plan and, consequently, to contribute to the identification of the weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats of the area of study; Secondly, the spatial delimitation of the different areas of the green infrastructure was integrated with that of the other categories of urban and rural land management.
• Identification, selection and evaluation of key ecosystem services for the delimitation of green infrastructure as the basis of territorial resilience to climate change.
• Optimization of the spatial delimitation of green infrastructure.
• Incorporation of public opinion in the delimitation of green infrastructure, so that citizens have been able to easily contribute, at any time and from anywhere, georeferenced information on the ecosystem services of their territory and their assessments of these, the incidence or risks of climate change in the area (i.e. floods, floods, floods, drought, fires or pests), etc.
• Project management and dissemination.

The INVERCLIMA project, aimed at developing tools to help plan green infrastructures to increase territorial resilience to climate change, has been able to develop methodologies and computer tools for the mapping and evaluation of 16 ecosystem services in Galicia relevant to the adaptation of the territory to climate change. Likewise, a program has been developed for the automatic delimitation of green infrastructure elements taking into account the results of the evaluation of ecosystem services, including a public participation process in which those involved provided information on the ecosystem services of their territory and their valuations.

The application of this green infrastructure design to the region of Lugo has made it possible to develop a Territorial Green Infrastructure Plan. The results of the delimitation for Galicia showed that the delimited green infrastructure has a potential for the provision of ecosystem services equal to or greater than the green infrastructure proposed in the Galician Green Infrastructure Strategy. However, according to the entity in charge of developing the project, the areas delimited with the tools of the Inverclima initiative are more regular and are closer to the areas that demand ecosystem services, thus guaranteeing a greater provision of ecosystem services.

In short, as main milestones, it has been possible to analyse the potential for the provision of 16 ecosystem services for Galicia, 5 technical articles have been prepared and 35 people have been trained in the use of computer tools for the mapping and planning of green infrastructure. Finally, 4 communications have been sent to different congresses such as the one sent to the Mediterranean Geosciences Union congress on the delimitation of ecological corridors, which received the award for the best contribution within the area of environmental earth sciences .