Within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (RTRP), funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, the Biodiversity Foundation already manages 195 million euros in aid for projects aimed at the renaturation of cities and the restoration of river ecosystems in urban environments. Currently, these grants have allowed the implementation of 55 projects in both lines of work (18 in the 2021 call for the renaturation of cities and 37 in the 2021 call for the restoration of river ecosystems and flood risk mitigation). New initiatives will soon be added since the deadline for submitting applications for the 2022 call for the renaturalization of cities remains open until December 22. The calls for applications for 2021 have been extraordinarily well received, with the submission of 99 and 230 applications, which requested 346 and 495 million euros, respectively. These figures are a sign of the high degree of interest of Spanish cities in integrating biodiversity into their urban planning models and of the firm commitment of local administrations to the ecological and fair transition, aware that the renaturalisation of cities is crucial to respond to the effects of climate change, improve the health of their inhabitants and recover biodiversity. aspects that will result in an increase in people’s quality of life. Urban renaturation and the generation of resilience are areas of knowledge in development, which arise as a response to the complex challenges faced by urban environments today: effects of climate change (floods, heat waves, etc.), pollution and urban health, vulnerability to health crises, etc. The facts have shown that distancing nature from the urban environment has entailed unacceptable economic costs in terms of health and quality of life, so it is necessary to work from the origin of the problem and bring nature back to the city, as an ally of the new urban model. To this end, it is necessary to promote a paradigm shift in the management of urban greenery and mobilise more resources to promote a true approach of nature to cities, giving capillarity to green infrastructure. In short, it is about transforming cities by improving ecological connectivity, increasing biodiversity and generating nature-based solutions that allow us to face the key challenges faced by Spanish cities. To this end, the projects promoted by the Biodiversity Foundation include urban and peri-urban forests, the burying of riverbeds as they pass through cities, innovative solutions when it comes to recovering degraded spaces or the requalification of green spaces to provide them with certain ecological functionality. Also recovery of groves and riparian forests, increase of river space, setback of mounds, recovery of old channel branches, renaturalization of the river bed and plains in urban areas for flood lamination, elimination of transversal barriers, permeabilization of obstacles, control of invasive exotic species, stabilization of banks with bioengineering techniques and removal of concrete and breakwaters, among others.

All of these are initiatives that clearly promote nature-based solutions, aimed at increasing the presence of natural elements in cities, from an ecosystem approach, which integrate biodiversity as the backbone of interventions, favouring and improving the diversity of habitats in cities, and which contemplate social cohesion in a transversal way through the participation of citizens and social agents.