The third meeting of GreenInUrbs has been held in Switzerland. The meeting took place on the 2nd – 3rd June 2014 at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Geopolis Building in the lakeside city of Lausanne. The event benefitted from local input from UNIL and members of the Cantonale Forestry Service. Delegates arrived from most COST Action Countries along with guests from America and Australia. The third GreenInUrbs meeting followed the successful second meeting of GreenInUrbs held in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The Project Coordinator of GreenInUrbs, Doctor Carlo Calfapietra, opened the meeting and welcomed attendees. In his address Doctor Calfapietra made reference to an agreement with the Journal of Environmental Quality on a special issue/content drawn from GreenInUrbs. He also referred to progress made on a GreenInUrbs ‘Opinion paper’ scheduled for later in 2014.
GreenInUrbs is structured around 4 working groups (WG1 – WG4). WG1 is focused on the environmental services of Urban Forestry and Green Infrastructure in relation to climate change. WG1 is the largest WG and met for a total of 8.5 hours spread across the two days. WG1 continued the momentum built up at the Sofia meeting and confirmed that all the activities started were on target or re-defined. The key focus of discussion was on quantitative and qualitative data collection in respect of environmental services and defining the threats posed by climate change on Urban Forests. WG1 participants agreed that the key focus should be on urban forests first and green infrastructure second due to the breadth of the latter. Participants stressed that this did not mean that Green Infrastructure was being downgraded rather adopting a sharper focus on trees, tree landscapes and urban woodland. WG1 participants also agreed to merge some of the themes previously agreed in Milan (2013) and Sofia (2013) and to accept that ‘resilience’ and ‘water’ should be seen as key crossing cutting themes. As a consequence (i) air issues together with climate variables (ii) biodiversity and (iii) goods and services would be the main sub-divisions. This was illustrated by the fact that both water and resilience were key issues affecting biodiversity.
Working Group 2 (WG2) discussions focused on qualitative and quantitative data collection on social and cultural services and the social distribution of ecosystem services. As with other Working Groups much of the session time was spent in small break out groups. WG2 participants identified the importance of synergy between two of its work streams leading to a merger between the previously separate Green Infrastructure and data collection activities.
Clive Davies; 7th June 2014
Other break out group activity focused on ‘Green Infrastructure and tourism’ and ‘Learning from what has known to have gone wrong with projects and using these as a basis for action research and applied learning’. The latter activity is revealing interesting findings. Notable is that a lack of participatory approaches is a common shortcoming with projects that have not achieved their objectives.
Working Group 3 (WG3) discussions focused on the governance of urban forestry within the wider green infrastructure context. The group is interested especially in the mapping of various policies related to urban forests and green space at different scales (national, regional, local) and looking into collaborative processes based on case studies (so far, 32 partnership case studies from 11 different countries have been assessed.) One subgroup is dedicated to gathering information on physical resources on various levels as this information is fundamental to proper management and governance of urban forests and green space. The result of the work so far would be two papers written by the end of this year.
A meeting of WG4 which is focused on dissemination of research did not take place within the meeting and a separate meeting will be held. The convenor of WG4, Professor Giovanni Sanesi, gathered suggestions such as those arising from WG3. It was agreed that WG4 should also gather information on economic evidence/data approaches.
Two plenary sessions were held at the third GreenInUrbs meeting. A guest lecture was given by keynote speaker Stephen Livesley from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Stephen Livesley drew from Australian research as well as case studies from the City of Melbourne. It was noted that the structure of Australian Cities, which are growing fast, and also incorporate large green spaces (such as golf courses) were more akin to spreading American city-models rather than the more compact European type. There were however notable parallels and learning points about wildfire management, disease management, stakeholder engagement and public access.
Participants agreed that the GreenInUrbs Website should become more active which could lead to new content such as short video and other interactive mechanisms including possible story-boards. A budget of €7,500 was allocated to each Working groups to facilitate small subject based meetings before the next main gathering of GreenInUrbs. Funds remain available for Short Term Scientific Missions and there was great encouragement to use this facility. There was also discussion about a ‘training school’ for PhD students at a future meeting.
The third meeting of GreenInUrbs was a success and good progress has been made since the meeting in Sofia. The next meeting of GreenInUrbs will be held on the 28th/29th October 2014 in Jerusalem.
