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News | 16 Jan 2025

Understanding collaborative governance of biodiversity-inclusive urban planning: Methodological approach and benchmarking results for urban nature plans in 10 European cities

The Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) team just published a new paper in the journal Urban Ecosystems to support the monitoring of the EU Biodiversity Strategy (EU BDS) regarding target 14 on urban greening plans for cities over 20,000 inhabitants.

This work was initiated because the KCBD team flagged that no indicator was available to track progress towards EU BDS target 14 "Cities with at least 20,000 inhabitants should develop an ambitious urban greening plan".

The paper proposes an analytical framework to evaluate the ambition level of urban greening plans based on criteria related to urban biodiversity goals and targets, collaborative governance, institutional support, public participation, financing mechanisms, and monitoring and evaluation. The framework was then applied to evaluate the ambition level of urban greening plans in 10 European cities. Only 4 out of the 10 cities performed well across all criteria. Collaborative governance, financing mechanisms and monitoring and evaluation are the three main criteria that cities could improve to raise the ambition level of their urban greening plans.

Should this analytical framework be applied to the ca 600 cities with at least 20,000 inhabitants in the EU, it could feed an indicator to monitor EU BDS target 14.