BlueGreen Infrastructure for a Sustainable Climate Adaptation of the Future City

Climate change combined with increasing urbanisation and conventional “grey” infrastructure results in numerous challenges.

Ecosystem-based adaptation using Blue-Green infrastructure (BGI) is an important strategy for creating climate-proof cities by delivery of technical, environmental, economic and social services.

However, today’s BGI research and implementation does not sufficiently reflect the complexity of the whole system, especially when multi-functional services are desired.

This project aims to identify when, how and why different BGI scenarios can contribute to climate change adaptation of cities by valuating environmental, economic and social/technical sustainability from a transsdisciplinary, integrated view. Different BGI-scenarios on catchment level will be co-developed for areas in Stockholm and Östersund in a living lab.

They will integrate variations in complexity, spatial distribution and time.

Given the inter-disciplinary nature of BGI planning/management and climate adaptation, the scenario evaluation will include aspects of flood protection, socio-economic valuing, assessment for circular society, pollutant treatment and strategic management.

A synthesis integrates outputs from these analyses to provide holistic evidence for choice and development of multifunctional BGI for climate-proof cities.

The societal benefit of this project is illustrated by its contribution to various SDGs, specifically SGD 11, 13, 9, 3 and 15, but also SDGs 14, 6, 12, 8 and 17.