Establishing nature-based solutions for resilient landscapes and cities – The CLEARING HOUSE project (EU H2020)

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly applied to guide the design of resilient landscapes and cities to enable them to reach economic development goals with beneficial outcomes for sustainability, resilience, ecosystem services, coupled human and environment, and green/ blue infrastructure. The European Commission is actively engaged in investing in NBS as a driver in developing ecosystem services-based approaches throughout Europe and the world, for example, by supporting large research project, such as CLEARING HOUSE – “Collaborative Learning in Research, Information-sharing and Governance on How Urban tree-based solutions support Sino-European urban futures”, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Grant Agreement No. 821242). Among the partners of this project, there are: the University of Bari (UNIBA), Italy and Beijing Forestry University (BFU), China. Starting from the NBS concept, Prof. Lafortezza will illustrate an approach to assess the benefits provided by NBS in urban areas through the integration of social data with remotely sensed data, such as high-resolution satellite images and Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point-cloud. This approach can inform planners and decision makers on ecosystem services supply and provide them with evidence of the local co-benefits of NBS as well as of the spatial distribution of ecosystem services across different urban geographical regions.