Issues which the lecture addresses

As cities grow denser, they also need to become greener. High-quality, accessible urban nature is being increasingly recognized as critical to healthy and equitable cities. Urban conservation planning can provide a powerful tool to reshape cities to strengthen local biodiversity, cultural connections to place, public health, and climate resilience, helping achieve The New Urban Agenda commitment of “adopting healthy lifestyles in harmony with nature.” Yet, little science-based guidance has been available to help urban practitioners strategically and systematically incorporate nature into cities.

Short analysis of the above issues

Current research on urban ecology resides in thousands of journal articles and has been largely inaccessible to urban practitioners. Their newly published report, Making Nature’s City, synthesizes global research on urban ecosystems to develop a science-based approach for supporting nature in cities. In this lecture, Robin and Erica introduce the principles of urban conservation planning and show examples of how cities can work strategically at multiple scales to connect, improve, and expand city greenspaces to better support biodiversity while making cities better places to live.

Propositions for addressing the issue

By synthesizing research from cities around the world, Robin and Erica, along with the SFEI, have identified seven key elements that contribute to biodiversity in cities. Together, these elements represent an integrated approach to creating and maintaining urban nature. The elements -- Patches, Corridors, Matrix, Habitat Diversity, Native Plant Vegetation, Special Resources, and Management -- translate ecological processes into practical components that can be implemented through the activities of the diverse public and private entities that together shape the nature of the city. Robin and Erica demonstrate examples of successful implementation of each element from diverse cities and scales and illustrate how these interventions can be scaled up to achieve the level of nature performance that will be needed in cities of the future.