CONNECTING is a project that will establish the EU as a global leader for climate resilience, collaborative processes, and innovation for Nature Based Solutions by drawing on the experiences from three selected front-running cities in this project: Genk (Belgium), Glasgow (UK) and Poznan (Poland). The CONNECTING front-runner cities have been chosen due to their quality of NBS exemplars and of cross-silo thinking, and participatory co-creation processes.

These cities have committed to scaling up and out these solutions at a city-wide systemic level and will work with eight fast-follower cities in a capacity-building role: A Coruña (Spain), Bologna (Italy), Burgas (Bulgaria), Ioannina (Greece), Malaga (Spain), Nicosia (Cyprus), Pavlos Melas (Greece) and Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina). These cities have the desire to scale up NBS, but currently lack the expertise.

A number of ‘multiplier’ cities in the Caucasus, China, Brazil and South Korea have also expressed an interest in CONNECTING, bringing the above-mentioned NBS to a global market.

This way, CONNECTING will expand upon existing urban sustainability and innovation initiatives, create a reference framework of clear and useful indicators for the implementation and evaluation of NBS, build expertise and competency in all cities for innovative urban planning, policy and solution implementation, generate economic opportunities for a diversity of urban actors in Europe, and nurture urban community support, idea creation, active stakeholder participation and idea implementation at local levels and expansion and replication at a global level, through the global reach of ICLEI. In addition, all open-sourced data will be linked to the Oppla platform so as to ensure perpetuation beyond the end of the project.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 Research & Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 730222. The sole responsibility for the content lies with the authors. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union.

Project Results

As a result, CONNECTING will:

– Develop and test a global, comprehensive and robust mechanism that will be used to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of NBS implementation in cities.

– Develop an urban and master planning process that will ‘burst open’ silos, enrich and nurture social, business and governance innovations and focus on the scaling-up of NBS in cities by connecting policy and market needs and turning barriers into opportunities for innovations.

– Develop a guiding process for identifying funding and financial mechanisms that establish NBS as evinced valid solutions for sustainable and resilient cities that are climate prepared.

– Showcase, and share learning from, the scaling-up, replication and integration of NBS for city-making within front-runner cities.

– Develop sustainable support for innovation, exploitation and enterprise development building on selected and promising new NBS exemplars from the front runner cities.

– Building on the Quintuple Helix approach to open innovation, engage communities of interest and communities of influence.

– Implement resourced masterplans in the fast-follower cities, engage them in capacity-building and experiential learning building and secure adequate funding to realise an accelerator masterplan.

– Encourage reporting and information sharing by cities, globalise the CONNECTING process and promote the uptake of NBS in non-EU and non-European countries.

– Optimise exploitation of project results through the development and implementation of an overall knowledge management strategy.

– Support the emergence, funding and growth of enterprises developing and supplying NBS through the inclusion of CONNECTING Enterprise Accelerator Programmes.

– Raise awareness among policy and decision makers about the CONNECTING evidence base and reference framework on NBS.

– Further develop the Oppla platform with more urban products and resources.