Line of action:

Urban environments

Status:

En ejecución

Location:

Pontevedra (Galicia)

Execution date:

2022

Duration:

01/08/2022-31/07/2025

The project seeks to enhance local green infrastructure, achieve greater resilience to the effects of climate change at the urban level, increase ecosystem services and improve the habitability and connectivity of the urban complex of Pontevedra with its peri-urban natural environment.
It is a commitment to continue transforming urban space by reinforcing the principles of renaturation, the promotion of biodiversity and ecosystem services in its internationally recognized and award-winning city model. This project involves evolving the current model of urban transformation of Pontevedra, which is developed through the Comprehensive Sustainable Urban Development Strategy (EDUSI), incorporating the concept of green infrastructure to transform the urban area into a greener territory that is more resilient to climate change and extreme phenomena, especially floods and fires. Pontevedra is located at the bottom and left bank of the estuary and has suffered in the past significant alterations of its maritime-fluvial space as it is occupied by grey infrastructures, making them more vulnerable to extreme phenomena.

The RedeVerde Pontevedra project will promote renaturalization, as a transversal dimension, in the process of urban transformation of Pontevedra; it will improve biodiversity; it will strengthen ecosystem services, especially those of regulation thanks to the improvement of urban metabolism, the connectivity of green and blue spaces and will encourage the habitability of the areas of intervention, improving the quality of life and health of citizens. Almost all the interventions are located in old maritime-river natural areas affected by the urbanization process of the twentieth century, which will help their renaturalization and contribute to their green transformation. The project will promote a green infrastructure strategy in the local area of Pontevedra and will be a benchmark for the urban renaturation of Atlantic coastal areas that are subject to natural risks (floods and fires) and that form an urban continuum. The project will make it possible to recover degraded urban river spaces that have historically been in demand, improve the relationship between the city and its natural environment, increase the biodiversity and metabolic behaviour of former natural areas and mark a new culture of urban intervention aimed at improving the resilience of the urban ecosystem to climate change.

The actions of this project will focus on the local strategy for green infrastructure and urban resilience in Pontevedra through the identification of risks and vulnerabilities and priority areas for action; the delimitation of green infrastructure elements: core areas, corridors, buffer zones and multifunctional areas in the municipality of Pontevedra; and, the preparation of the Action Plan for the Local Strategy for Green Infrastructure and Urban Resilience of Pontevedra.

Other actions it contemplates are the recovery and ecological restoration of the underground urban section of the Gafos River and its surroundings; the ecological and landscape improvement of the surroundings of the fairgrounds and the inclusion of sustainable urban drainage systems; the ecological, landscape and biodiversity restoration of the María Vinyals Park and the Lérez green area; the ecological restoration and improvement of the biodiversity of the Alba marsh; and, the installation of a green roof in the Pazo da Cultura.