Elena Pita opened the session “Nature-based solutions (NBS). Towards more livable cities”, held at the National Congress of the Environment.

The director of the Biodiversity Foundation, Elena Pita, opened the session “Nature-based solutions (NBS). Towards more livable cities”, held at the National Congress of the Environment (Conama 2020) and in which she was accompanied by the general director of Territory and Architecture of the Region of Murcia, Jaime Pérez; Enrique Salvo, director of the NBS Chair at the University of Malaga; and Alicia Torrego, director of the Conama Foundation.

Elena Pita stressed that it is essential to implement NBS in the urban environment and highlighted the Foundation’s new line of action, focused on the renaturalisation and resilience of urban ecosystems. The renaturation of cities is a movement and a growing trend of global scope, which claims the contribution of the ecosystem services offered by green and blue infrastructures in urban systems. Thus, the National Strategy for Green Infrastructure and Ecological Connectivity and Restoration delves into the interest of green infrastructure solutions in urban environments. Likewise, the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change 2021-2030 underlines the interest in integrating adaptation to climate change in territorial and urban planning, as well as in the building sector.

The Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan aims to mobilise investments in green infrastructure to promote ecological connectivity and promote nature restoration programmes aimed at increasing biodiversity and its services, including nature-based solutions.

Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by this Plan, the Biodiversity Foundation is working to promote initiatives that favour transformative and ambitious projects, which contribute to urban renaturation, with the aim of increasing biodiversity and adaptation to global change and improving the habitability of cities.

Within the framework of the session “Nature-based solutions. Towards more livable cities” there was also a round table on tools and methodology to apply NBS at the municipal level, where ideas, proposals and points of view were shared to enable its application in municipal projects of different kinds.

Finally, a panel of experiences was held where projects included in the NBS Observatory were presented, which show varied and unique applications of NBS.