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Governing urban greening at a metropolitan scale: an analysis of the Living Melbourne strategy
Abstract
As Australian cities face challenges of increased size, density and a range of environmental issues, compounded by climate change impacts, integration of greening is receiving increased attention. Greening, in the form of parks, gardens, waterways, water-sensitive designs and green roofs, contributes to liveability, sustainability and resilience, and habitat for non-human species. Local governments are responsible for the day-to-day management of much of Australia’s urban public spaces and are developing strategies for these areas. However, local-scale planning risks piecemeal, uncoordinated and ineffective approaches, particularly for biophysical systems that have little relationship with municipal boundaries. How can a metropolitan-scale approach be applied to green space planning and governance? This paper presents a case study of Living Melbourne metropolitan urban forest strategy, developed by Nature Conservancy and Resilient Melbourne. Resilient Melbourne brings together Melbourne’s 32 local governments to plan and advocate at the metropolitan scale. While the Living Melbourne strategy provides a metropolitan-scale approach, questions of governance, including how the strategy will be implemented and how local context is understood, are highlighted. Further, in developing a metropolitan-scale approach, how are the voices of local communities included? The paper analyses who is governing Melbourne’s urban greening, and the benefits and risks of a metropolitan-scale approach.
... However, in the context of Australian cities, this top-down mode of governance for the metropolitan region is not how metropolitan-wide governance is emerging. Instead, metropolitan-wide (informal) platforms are emerging, such as Resilient Melbourne (Frantzeskaki and Bush 2021), Living Melbourne (Bush, Coffey, and Fastenrath 2020;Coenen et al. 2020;Fastenrath, Bush, and Coenen 2020;Hartigan et al. 2021), and Regen Melbourne (https://www. regen.melbourne/). ...
... Firstly, the pioneering, leadership, and international visibility of City of Melbourne's urban forest strategy (Gulsrud, Hertzog, and Shears 2018), especially its design, operation, and impact on planning approaches. Secondly, the collaborative, metropolitan-wide approach for urban forestry developed by Living Melbourne is crucial for resourcing, developing tools, and partnering opportunities to up-scale urban forestry actions in public and private realms (Bush, Coffey, and Fastenrath 2020;Fastenrath, Bush, and Coenen 2020; The Nature Conservancy and Resilient Melbourne 2019). ...
... This means that different institutional spaces will often co-exist and overlap across multiple governance levels (e.g., local, metropolitan) and can therefore influence each other. For example, pioneering institutional spaces often have a powerful champion to open and create this space, such as the innovation and leadership of the City of Melbourne (Bush et al. 2023b;Gulsrud, Hertzog, and Shears 2018) and the influence of Living Melbourne (Bush, Coffey, and Fastenrath 2020;Coenen et al. 2020;Fastenrath, Bush, and Coenen 2020;Hartigan et al. 2021), which can be used to leverage collaboration to build on these legacies in other contexts. Institutional spaces therefore have intermediating characteristics in which the capabilities and capacities of actors to create and participate in them can either be individual or collective. ...
Australia is experiencing an accelerated rate of climate-related extreme weather events, and many of the solutions to reduce the exposure to climate-risk are nature-based, governing urban forests, waterways, and stormwater. However, the governance of nature-based solutions in Australian cities is still fragmented and piecemeal, generally lacking a coherent narrative and widespread support. What is needed are institutional spaces that mainstream such solutions. In this paper, we draw on a case study of urban forestry implementation across metropolitan Melbourne, as a lens to examine the creation and evolution of such institutional spaces. We explain the functions and design characteristics of institutional spaces from the perspective of the requirements for establishing and maintaining institutional spaces and what is produced or the outcomes from institutional spaces. The mobilisation and evolution of institutional spaces are important to understand for the impact on the planning and governance of individual cities as well as the metropolitan region. Our key findings frame institutional spaces as relational, learning-oriented, collaborative, and empowering spaces that facilitate transformative agendas and actions for the mainstreaming of nature-based solutions in cities. From these findings, we identify seven recommendations for how practitioners can make the most of institutional spaces. Practitioner pointers. Creating space to bridge silos, foster experimentation, and develop evidence-based policy is critical to mainstream nature-based solutions.. Collaborative approaches are essential for effective institutional spaces, to participate in networking and knowledge co-production opportunities.. Actors in institutional spaces facilitate mainstreaming by learning from and building on policy and practice legacies. ARTICLE HISTORY
... Terms that are infrastructure-related, such as green infrastructure [9], urban greening [32], water sensitive urban design [31], urban green spaces [33], urban forests [34], issue-specific terms such as ecosystem services [35], are being used to refer to NbS in Australia the most frequently (Table 2). However globally accepted NbS terminology, as defined first by the IUCN [18] and more recently revised and adopted by the United Nations Environment Assembly, has yet to be fully adopted in the Australian literature [29,[36][37][38][39][40]. As a result, projects, research and studies which may technically be considered NbS may not use that terminology [41][42][43]. ...
... This was being led by international and local policy, with 14 % of papers referencing the Sustainable Development Goals and 7 % of the papers discussing the Paris Climate Agreement. Local governments are using urban NbS in policy to help minimize adverse effects of climate change in cities and urban areas [6,9,26,29,36,38,42,[44][45][46]. For that reason, NbS for adaptation and effective climate policy is occurring from the "bottom-up" in Australia ( [47]; Fig. 6). ...
... This was being led by international and local policy, with 37% of the papers discussing the Paris Climate Agreement. Local governments are using urban NbS in policy to help minimize adverse effects of climate change in cities and urban areas (Bayulken et al. 2021;Bush et al. 2020;Coenen et al. 2020;Croeser et al. 2020;Fastenrath et al. 2020;Frantzeskaki and Bush 2021;Gulsrud et al. 2018;Ordonez 2019;Pineda-Pinto et al. 2021;Zhang et al. 2019). For that reason, NbS for adaptation and effective climate policy is occuring from the "bottom-up" in Australia (Rayner 2010; . ...
... literature(Bush, Coffey & Fastenrath 2020;Uebel et al. 2021;Castonguay et al. 2018;Coenen et al. 2020;Pineda-Pinto et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2022). As a result, projects, research and studies which may technically be considered NbS may not use that terminology(Zhang et al. 2019; Greenway 2017 and Benites & Osmond 2021). ...
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are emerging as an approach to sustainable environmental management and addressing environmental and social issues in ways that benefit human well-being and biodiversity. NbS have been applied to social-environmental challenges such as climate change and urbanization, but with diverse conceptualisations and applications that may impact their effectiveness and broader uptake. Much of the literature and implementation of NbS has emerged from Europe and though NbS use is rising in Australia, the context is unclear. This systematic quantitative literature review aims to understand Nature-based Solutions in an Australian context.
Here we explore the meaning and practical uses of NbS in Australia, through three research questions: In Australia, 1) what is meant by the term ‘nature-based solutions’? 2) what socio-ecological challenges do NbS aim to address and how? 3) are there gaps in NbS research and policy application that are hindering uptake of NbS approaches?
We show that in Australia, local governments are using NbS in urban planning to address the compounding challenges brought on by climate change in the human-environment interfaces. However, there is no consensus on NbS definitions and approaches, research is focussed on urban areas and problems, and NbS implementation follows a bottom-up, localised pattern without an integrated policy framework. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for improving the implementation of NbS in Australia including: 1) a consistency of NbS definition and awareness of NbS approaches; 2) interdisciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration on NbS methods and effectiveness and; 3) an integrated policy framework supporting NbS nationwide.
... The development of Living Melbourne was supported by a high degree of stakeholder engagement throughout the process and has been described "as an instance of metropolitan governance in action" [50][51][52]. Approximately 65 organisations and over 250 individuals made contributions to the strategy. ...
... LGAs as key stakeholders and other major land management organisations (e.g., water authorities and public land managers) were specifically targeted as key endorsers as a subset of the wider consultation undertaken. Suggestions by some academic commentators [51,52] that the views of other key stakeholders (e.g., transport, health) were not sought is erroneous. ...
Urban forests provide many ecosystem services, such as reducing heat, improving air quality, treatment of stormwater, carbon sequestration, as well as biodiversity benefits. These benefits have resulted in increasing demand for urban forests and strategies to maintain and enhance this natural infrastructure. In response to a broader resilience strategy for Melbourne, Australia, we outline how a metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy (Living Melbourne) was developed, encompassing multiple jurisdictions and all land tenures. To this end, we mapped tree cover within the Melbourne metropolitan area, modelled potential habitat for some bird species, and investigated the role of tree cover for urban heat island mitigation. We outline the consultation and governance frameworks used to develop the strategy, the vision, goals and actions recommended, including canopy and shrub cover targets for different parts of the metropolitan area. The metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy acts as an overarching framework to guide local government authorities and various stakeholders towards a shared objective of increasing tree cover in Melbourne and we discuss the outcomes and lessons from this approach
... The current research on NBS, specifically from the lens of urban planning and sustainability stems from urban centres of the global North and there is a lack of understanding the economic, social and environmental contexts from emerging urban areas of the global South, though they comprise increasingly vulnerable populations with limited access to resources [8]. The same is highlighted in the case of the African continent as well, where there is limited references to NBS in national adaptation plans attributed to 'political unwillingness to fund and enforce natural resource conservation' [11] Previous research suggests that NBS as a multifunctional approach which produces co-benefits [7, 12] and can help to strengthen nature-human relations, especially in urban areas [13] to achieve urban resilience agendas [7,14]. Thus, for instance, Sedon et al [15] demonstrate that NBS foster partnerships among people and nature with a view to address societal goals. ...
Nature-based solutions have gained popularity as an approach to reduce the impacts of climate and environmental change, providing multi-fold and multi-sectoral benefits especially in cities. Yet there has been growing concern about their utility for cities of the Global South, a concern fuelled by the paucity of studies, including scientific peer reviewed and gray literature. In this paper, we contribute to this knowledge gap, based on an analysis of 120 case studies of NBS in Global South cities, documented in two databases (Urban Natural Atlas and Oppla). These cases fall largely under categories of blue and green infrastructure, with a few cases also focusing on grey infrastructure (in buildings or campuses). While most cases are in Asia, several have also been documented in Africa and Central/South America. Two-third of documented NBS cases are aligned towards either national, or lower-level (regional and local) policies indicating the importance of policy mechanisms for driving their implementation. Institutional arrangements are usually non-government, government or collaborative arrangements, with the goal of climate resilience, biodiversity support and ecosystem restoration—along with social goals of creating public spaces. However, when private players take on the mandate for NBS, they focus primarily on grey infrastructure (in buildings and campuses), primarily meant for private or employee benefits, and not for the public. In cases where public engagement is a stated priority, we find tokenistic approaches deployed, primarily seeking engagement through information dissemination and consultation predominate. Despite the stated importance for participation and engagement, only a few cases focused on empowerment and co-creation of NBS with local communities. We suggest that there is a greater need for documentation regarding the modes of participation especially on roles and levels of actors involved, to enrich our understanding of the impact of NBS on values of justice and equity in the cities of the global South.
... Furthermore, the city of Melbourne, Australia, has implemented extensive urban greening initiatives, including the creation of green corridors and public parks [44] . These efforts aim to enhance biodiversity, provide recreational spaces, and improve overall urban well-being, demonstrating the versatility of NbS in different geographic and cultural contexts. ...
p>This opinion article delves into the critical role of nature-based solutions (NbS) for climate change mitigation. Despite their recognized potential, the multifaceted challenges of NbS remain complex and under-explored. Both potential and limitations are discussed, including economic, social, and political considerations. The importance of an interdisciplinary approach and adaptation to diverse socioeconomic and cultural contexts to ensure equitable implementation of NbS are highlighted. This brief but critical perspective seeks to enrich the academic view and provide actionable insights for urban planners and policymakers. Finally, it proposes directions for future studies to researchers in the field of sustainable urban development and climate change mitigation.</p
... However, as a tradeoff of the focus on organisational engagement, our case study's stakeholder structure and decision-making practice lacked open and inclusive community participation. This finding was broadly in harmony with those of and Bush et al. (2020), who criticised the lack of direct community participation within Living Melbourne. Such a limitation risks impacting the 'visibility' of governance experiments, limiting opportunities for leveraging greater (community and political) support needed for institutionalisation and achieving social transformation. ...
This paper investigates the institutionalisation of 100 Resilient Cities [100RC] governance experiments in cities that lack a metropolitan government. In examining this phenomenon, the research develops a novel analytical framework that builds upon the ‘beyond experiments’ literature and two conceptual foundations: the role of urban governance context, particularly cities lacking a metropolitan government, and the role of transnational city networks. The framework is then applied to review the case study of Living Melbourne (Resilient Melbourne) – a 100RC governance experiment implemented in Melbourne, Australia. Key findings show that the institutionalisation of 100RC governance experiments occurs in cities lacking a metropolitan government by generating new changes in governance, particularly around two key domains: ways of thinking and ways of organising. The study also reveals that most changes generated via institutionalisation are incremental and reformistic, rarely transformational adjustments that can directly bring about urban sustainability transitions. In addition, this research suggests that the extent of institutionalisation is influenced by three key factors: (1) existing metropolitan governance conditions, (2) internal conditions of governance experiments and (3) city networks (only to a limited extent).
... • Innovation through local-regional relationship building (Voghera, 2020) • Learning for mainstreaming NBS into policy (Di Giulio et al., 2018) • Place-based leadership and learning An example of governance-based experimentation is the Living Melbourne Strategy, Melbourne, Australia, which provides an emerging (informal) platform for urban forestry governance to be re-scaled to the metropolitan-level Coenen et al., 2020;Bush et al., 2020). Therefore, urban experimentation contributes to the NBS mainstreaming in cities by introducing and pursuing new or novel practices and the relationships that re-configure unsustainable systems to enable the diffusion of sustainable solutions (Fuenfschilling et al., 2019). ...
Nature-based solutions are gaining prominence in urban sustainability discourses, especially in climate adaptation , in efforts to increase resilience, and as a means of promoting a range of social, environmental, and economic benefits. There are however barriers and inertia that slow the adoption of such solutions, and a term commonly used for overcoming such factors is mainstreaming. The term mainstreaming in relation to nature-based solutions is ambiguous, as it is entangled within or conflated with other similar concepts that also describe change processes. This lack of clarity is a cause for potential misdirection of planning with nature-based solutions towards more climate resilient cities. Therefore, this article expands and deepens the understanding of mainstreaming nature-based solutions in cities by proposing a (re)conceptualisation of the term mainstreaming. Our (re)conceptualisation explores mainstreaming in the context of multi-level governance, to unpack where mainstreaming can unfold within and across levels, and focuses on knowledge drivers, to unpack how main-streaming activities are shaped. These dimensions are important for unpacking where mainstreaming can happen and what informs mainstreaming activities, facilitating more effective discourses, policy-making, and wider adoption of urban nature-based solutions. We report on a systematic literature review and synthesis of 147 articles , which proposes a new mainstreaming framework and definition by identifying five mechanisms and four roles to explain how mainstreaming processes unfold or mobilise in cities. This adds a framework and language to the academic and policy debate that is needed for operationalising nature-based solutions mainstreaming processes, and thereby to transform urban planning practices.
... In Australia, many cities have declared climate emergency, creating an enabling policy context for biodiversity targets and green canopy targets to follow up, benefiting the uptake of nature-based solutions by all the states of the country. The City of Melbourne pioneered a metropolitan approach with a collaborative and integrative process in formulating the Urban Forest strategy pointing on ways to scale up greening solutions (Moloney & Doyon, 2021) and renaturing/rewilding approaches across spaces, waterfronts and park areas Bush et al., 2020). It has been a landmark planning strategy for many cities in Australia to push for biodiversity action plans and agendas and showcase novel ways to engage with Indigenous communities and practices around urban nature and biodiversity. ...
This chapter explains the importance for nature-based solutions as resilience infrastructure of cities. It sets the scene for the challenges and opportunities
presented by a city-wide uptake and implementation of nature-based solutions as
integrative and systemic solutions to planning for urban resilience and sustainability. We present not only the origins and the reasons for preferring nature-based solutions over conventional grey infrastructure for dealing with climate change pressures
but also how different planning aspects of nature-based solutions need to be reconsidered, reimagined and thereafter, transformed. In conclusion, an outlook towards
future cities is given on revolutionizing urban planning practice through nature-based solutions.
... However, climate impacts and risks for governance and social elements underpinning NBSs are manifold and affect areas as water supply, wastewater treatment, energy saving, social and health services. Thus, implementing NBS require extensive planning, management, and engagement across multiple stakeholders, and these stakeholders may change depending on the climate change impacts (Bush and Doyon, 2019;Bush et al., 2020). ...
Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) promise a future where natural, human and technical elements help solving many of the issues plaguing cities. Pollution reduction, increased human wellbeing and climate change adaptation are only some of the challenges targeted by NBSs.
However, under the warming climate affecting many of the world’s cities, most of modern NBSs will be highly impacted by the same climate factors they hope to mitigate. As in the case of extreme temperatures or altered water availability, these factors can impact and cause the failure in the organisms, technical elements and governance structures that NBSs rely upon, thus decreasing performance, reliability and sustainability of these solutions.
In this commentary we propose critical considerations related to designing, building and managing “climate-ready” NBSs – defined as local integrated solutions able to cope with or adapt to climate change. We do so by highlighting examples in heat- and drought-stricken areas across Australian cities as they sit at the global forefront of a hotter world. We discuss in detail i) tolerance and adaptability of NBS to new climates, ii) NBS design for weather extremes and climate-safety margins, iii) NBS trialing and prototyping, and iv) planning for “climate-ready” NBSs.
In doing so, we highlight caveats and limitations to propose an implementation framework to make NBSs not only work, but succeed, in a hotter urban world; one that sees 50 °C as a critical limit to sustain urban life and nature.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are implemented across multiple cities worldwide and feature as promising solutions in local and global agendas. As solutions that can deal with interlinked urban challenges, NBS are being taken up by cities in different geographies and are considered to be mainstreaming. The process, referred to as mainstreaming, and how this can be achieved needs to be better understood, which is identified as a research gap. In this paper, we examine the roles that actors can undertake that contribute to the mainstreaming of NBS in cities. The aim is to understand the roles that urban actors, especially those within local governments, assume in the process of NBS mainstreaming to mobilise and implement novel and innovative strategic solutions for cities. This topic is explored in a case study of the metropolitan Melbourne region in Australia, where urban forest strategies are gaining traction in local governments for addressing urban resilience concerns. We present how the roles different actors assume contribute to the (re)shaping, building, and/or transformation of institutions to attain climate and ecologically resilient cities. The main contribution of this paper is a pathways framework that illustrates how sustainability norms can move through the mainstreaming process, facilitated by the roles that actors undertake-to champion, advocate, and realise transformative discourses and actions within urban politics and urban practices. Our key findings are framed as success factors of mainstreaming agencies and pathways underpinning transformation, which are: commitment longevity, innovative capacity, collaborative mindset, and on-ground delivery.
Cities are at the forefront of sustainability agendas, especially as places to implement the solutions needed to address key sustainability challenges. City-level governments have responded in diverse ways to these challenges, including adopting and implementing a mix of policies to improve resilience and liveability that address issues including heat mitigation, water security, and climate risks. To support such sustainability strategies, we argue that mainstreaming, as process of embedding novel thinking and solutions into governance and practice, urgently needs to be comprehensively understood and leveraged. Therefore, drawing on a mix of empirical and theoretical research and focusing on the mainstreaming of nature-based solutions in urban planning, we examine and systematically conceptualise mainstreaming as a governance and planning process. Drawing on a recent case study of urban forestry governance across metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, we show how the identified drivers and mechanisms of mainstreaming can be successfully applied. The resulting framework emphasises the need for a dynamic understanding of mainstreaming processes and what ensures they can be enabled and accelerated in the governance and planning of cities. Further, this framework may be applied for mainstreaming urban nature-based solutions as well as other sustainability innovations.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly being adopted to address climate change, health, and urban sustainability, yet ensuring they are effective and inclusive remains a challenge. Addressing these challenges through chapters by leading experts in both global south and north contexts, this forward-looking book advances the science of NBS in cities and discusses the frontiers for next-generation urban NBS.
As cities increasingly turn to nature-based solutions to address key urban socio-ecological challenges, approaches to their governance, planning and implementation are increasingly important for ensuring their effectiveness. Nature-based solutions are multifunctional, and so their planning and implementation are by necessity interdisciplinary. As such, to support urban transitions with nature-based solutions, the role of intermediary actors deserves research attention. Intermediaries play key roles in linking between sectors, across different levels of government and between disciplines and policy domains. We identified three key points for research and planning nature-based solutions through intermediaries as key agents for change: intermediaries are creators of enabling institutional spaces needed for mainstreaming nature-based solutions in cities; intermediaries as actor configurations are dynamic over time and in context, and intermediation has to be understood as a fundamental governance activity in cities that want to scale up their climate adaptation planning with nature-based solutions. Using a case study of the development and initial implementation of the metropolitan urban forest strategy in Melbourne Australia, we analyze the multi-actor landscape that emerged, through the lens of intermediation. We systematically investigated which actors, partnerships and platforms acted as intermediaries in the transformative agenda of the Urban Forest strategy, how these actors interacted over the course of the strategy’s development and how their roles and functions shifted during the early implementation stages of the strategy. We found that an ‘ecology of intermediaries’ adopted a range of roles to support key functions including building collaboration, informing and disseminating policy learning, and strengthening political support. While intermediaries’ roles and functions shifted across the strategy’s development, their contributions were critical in the complex metropolitan governance context. Collaborative planning and governance for nature-based solutions in cities require intermediaries to remain topical, focused and inclusive/open to new ideas and lessons from innovations both emerging and driven.
Australian cities have been slow to implement green roofs. This is because there are many potential barriers to their widely acceptance as a nature based solution that can make cities more liveable and help them adapt to, and mitigate, climate change. Due to significant differences in rainfall, temperature, available substrates and suitable vegetation relying on northern hemisphere research and experience is problematic as many of the environmental and economic benefits of green roofs are location specific. This paper aims to 1. synthesise a decade of Australian green roof research that has sought to overcome these barriers, 2. assess the current status of the Australian green roof industry and remaining knowledge gaps, and 3. provide a roadmap for future progress developed in multidisciplinary industry workshops. Many of these insights will be applicable to areas with similar seasonally hot and dry climates or emerging green roof markets.
We identified that significant progress has been made in addressing the barriers to green roofs in Australia. Research has focused on developing green roofs for local conditions and quantifying their benefits. Substrate research has investigated the suitability of locally available materials with a focus on how water retention additives and organic waste materials can increase plant available water and therefore survival. By taking a plant physiology approach Australian researchers have gained a strong functional understanding of suitable green roof plants and the benefits they provide, considerably expanding the available palette beyond the succulents commonly used internationally. Research has quantified green roofs’ stormwater retention and building insulation and energy benefits and provided evidence that they benefit well-being and performance, important for employee productivity.
Melbourne ist von einem außergewöhnlichen Bevölkerungswachstum und einer rasanten Ausbreitung in die Fläche geprägt. Seit den 1980er-Jahren wird versucht, den urban sprawl und den Energieverbrauch im Verkehr durch Nachverdichtung zu begrenzen. In den letzten Jahren sind weitere ökologische Themen, wie der Klimawandel und der Verlust an Biodiversität ins Bewusstsein gerückt. Allerdings erschweren politisch-administrative Grenzen im Großraum eine ganzheitliche Planung. Welche Strategien der Stadtplanung werden in Melbourne verfolgt und wie kann die Stadt den Ansprüchen einer nachhaltigen und resilienten Entwicklung gerecht werden?
Australian cities are receiving attention for their sustainability and resilience initiatives – innovative approaches to cope with challenges of dynamic population growth, loss of biodiversity and shocks such as extreme weather events. This paper discusses these recent trends in Australian urban development by focusing on Melbourne’s resilience initiative, which highlights the need for ‘nature-based solutions’. This new element of urban planning requires experimental forms of cooperation between stakeholders from public and private sectors, academia and civil society.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are heralded as tools to address and tackle a variety of socio-ecological challenges. NBS are increasingly discussed as a response to shocks and stresses such as loss of biodiversity, air pollution, heat waves, flooding, droughts; and issues around residents' health and wellbeing. In recognition of these multiple functions and potential co-benefits, cities are increasingly developing NBS strategies through urban forests, green walls and facades. There has recently been a vibrant debate about extending, linking or merging successful NBS - often framed as 'scaling-up'. Despite the increasing popularity, little is known about the mechanisms and conditions for scaling-up of NBS and how this plays out in practice. How is scaling-up understood and is there an optimal scale for NBS? Previous work has addressed that the misinterpretation of scale can produce suboptimal outcomes for the resilience and sustainability of human-environmental systems. Particularly challenging is the introduction of new and adjusting established institutional arrangements to drive and coordinate socio-ecological change. Using the strategy 'Living Melbourne – Our metropolitan urban forest' as a case study, this paper explores and analyses how NBS and scaling-up are addressed and implemented in a metropolitan-wide greening strategy. The study shows that scaling-up of NBS is complex and needs inter- and transdisciplinary expertise to cope with a range of ecological, institutional and socio-cultural challenges. Intermediaries are needed to provide platforms of ongoing exchange between the heterogenous stakeholders from public and private sectors, academia and society.
Cities face increasing environmental, social and economic challenges that together threaten the resilience of urban areas and the residents who live and work there. These challenges include chronic stresses and acute shocks, amplified by climate change impacts. Nature-based solutions have emerged as a concept for integrating ecosystem-based approaches to address a range of societal challenges. Nature-based solutions directly address and contribute to increased urban resilience. However, implementing nature-based solutions is inherently complex, given the range of ecosystem services, their multi-functionality and the trade-offs between functions, and across temporal and spatial scales. Urban planning can play a substantial role to support the implementation of nature-based solutions and to manage trade-offs and conflicts, as well as how social equity dimensions are considered. This paper presents a framework that guides the application of urban planning to nature-based solutions’ implementation, by addressing key trade-offs across temporal, spatial, functional and social equity aspects. The framework highlights the key questions, and the supporting information required to address these questions, to underpin the inclusion of nature-based solutions for urban resilience. We find that while urban planning can contribute substantially, there are continuing gaps in how the inherently anthropocentric urban planning processes can give voice to non-human nature.
Urban environments are arguably among the most suitable targets for conservation science, as they represent opportunities to preserve both species and habitats under threat while at the same time allowing people to engage with nature. We highlight the need for conservation within urban environments using species whose recovery is entirely dependent on effective action within cities and towns. We identified 39 urban‐restricted species in Australia and reviewed the advice guiding their conservation to address the question, “What does conservation look like when cities are the last chance for saving species?” We argue that in such circumstances securing land for conservation purposes cannot be relied upon; instead, species must be protected on lands not originally intended for conservation and urban communities must be involved in recovery actions. Ultimately, to achieve such outcomes, decision makers need to recognize the importance of urban ecosystems in the recovery of imperiled species.
More and more cities are developing strategies and implementing actions to increase their resilience to a diversity of environmental, social and economic challenges. International networks such as 100 Resilient Cities, established by the Rockefeller Foundation, are supporting cities to find and implement solutions to 'shocks and stresses.' This new approach to urban governance, often initiated by philanthropic organizations, is debated. On the one hand, these initiatives are celebrated as catalysts for transformational change through 'collaboration' and 'co-design' in contexts such as mobility, energy, green space or housing. On the other hand, urban resilience initiatives have been criticized for prioritizing private sector agendas and top-down approaches and hollowing out public sector tasks and democratic participation. However, little is known how urban resilience strategies are actually implemented in practice. Embedded action research on the implementation of the Resilient Melbourne strategy provides the opportunity to have a closer look at this highly contested topic. This paper provides first insights into the research project Urban Resilience in Action, using the Resilient Melbourne strategy to assess the implementation of selected actions. It shows that a reconceptualization and new analytical dimensions are needed to understand urban resilience as an urban innovation strategy.
Despite repeated calls to action, proposals for urban conservation are often met with surprise or scepticism. There remains a pervasive narrative in policy, practice, and the public psyche that urban environments, although useful for engaging people with nature or providing ecosystem services, are of little conservation value. We argue that the tendency to overlook the conservation value of urban environments stems from misconceptions about the ability of native species to persist within cities and towns and that this, in turn, hinders effective conservation action. However, recent scientific evidence shows that these assumptions do not always hold. Although it is generally true that increasing the size, quality, and connectivity of habitat patches will improve the probability that a species can persist, the inverse is not that small, degraded, or fragmented habitats found in urban environments are worthless. In light of these findings we propose updated messages that guide and inspire researchers, practitioners, and decision makers to undertake conservation action in urban environments: consider small spaces, recognize unconventional habitats, test creative solutions, and use science to minimize the impacts of future urban development.
Calls for humanity to ‘reconnect to nature’ have grown increasingly louder from both scholars and civil society. Yet, there is relatively little coherence about what reconnecting to nature means, why it should happen and how it can be achieved. We present a conceptual framework to organise existing literature and direct future research on human–nature connections. Five types of connections to nature are identified: material, experiential, cognitive, emotional, and philosophical. These various types have been presented as causes, consequences, or treatments of social and environmental problems. From this conceptual base, we discuss how reconnecting people with nature can function as a treatment for the global environmental crisis. Adopting a social–ecological systems perspective, we draw upon the emerging concept of ‘leverage points’—places in complex systems to intervene to generate change—and explore examples of how actions to reconnect people with nature can help transform society towards sustainability.
Complementary public and private conservation action is required to sustain native biodiversity in cities. Residents can contribute by wildlife gardening – removing environmental weeds, cultivating indigenous flora, and improving habitat in their gardens. There is currently little guidance about how best to involve residents in wildlife gardening and align their work with public land management. We explored how a purposively chosen wildlife gardening program in Melbourne, Australia engaged and supported residents to augment local government efforts to conserve indigenous biota. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with program members to understand the program’s impact on their gardening and their connections with their council and community. Unpublished Council survey data were used to position interview findings on wildlife gardening activities and the value of program features. Interviewees detailed how they modified their gardening to assist their council to conserve indigenous biota. Five program features were implicated in this change: (1) on-site garden assessment; (2) indigenous community nursery; (3) communication hubs; (4) a framework that fosters experiential learning and community linkages; and (5) endorsement of each garden’s potential conservation contribution. Collaborative wildlife gardening programs can engage residents to manage their land to achieve landscape-focused conservation goals while building relationships with council and community.
Rapid expansion of urban built-up areas since the 1950s has led to the Milan region becoming one of the major metropolitan areas of Europe. This has been accompanied by significant structural changes to urban and peri-urban landscapes and fragmentation of formerly contiguous green corridors by the distribution of new urban forms such as housing and transport infrastructure. The need to address the loss of green space was first recognised by policy-makers at the end of the 1970s and in due course, this has led to new policies and laws. These policies included the introduction of the Milan metropolitan parks approach that, nowadays, is represented by numerous urban forests that have become the backbone of green infrastructure (GI) creation and management. In the last decades, a total of 10 000 hectares of new forests and green systems have been created. Boscoincittà and Parco Nord Milano are the best known examples of this approach aimed to redevelop the neighbourhoods of some suburbs of Milan to create multifunctional green spaces (forests, grasslands, wetlands, river corridor, and allotment gardens) in lands previously industrial or uncultivated. The creation and management of urban forests has become the backbone of GI creation and management in the Metropolitan Area of Milan. In recent decades, trends of land use change have been characterised by a rapid decrease in natural and agricultural areas and an increase in artificial and urban structures. Although the phenomenon is growing rapidly in this area, there is evidence of an opposite social and environmental trend highlighting the importance of GI positively affecting urban quality of life. Recent policies and management plans are dealing with this evidence by turning their attention to expanding green areas and infrastructure. The purpose of our investigation is to revisit effective measures designed to increase the quality and quantity of UGI in the metropolitan region under study. To this end, we assessed land use changes and described the potentialities and impacts of policies on such phenomena. The study analyses the main elements of UGI in the Italian context within the framework of the European Union Life + project called Emonfur, a research programme involving, inter alia, the establishment of an Urban Forest inventory and impact analysis of ecosystem services in the Metropolitan Area of Milan. Our research has allowed us to determine the current status of key sites by monitoring the policy and planning decisions that resulted in their development. We believe that such an analysis can pave the way to understand future land-use dynamics not only in northern Italy but in other metropolitan territories as well.
The compact city approach has gained global impact as a planning approach for sustainable development in areas with increasing urban population. Through densification and compact building, it aims to counteract negative effects of urban sprawl concerning ineffective land-use and related environmental problems. In spite of its benefits, increasing attention is paid to problems and challenges related to implementing the compact city approach.
This review looks at the effects of urban densification and compact city development on urban green space and its planning. It identifies problems, challenges and strategies of urban green space planning during densification processes. Findings confirm that urban densification processes, including consolidation and infill development, can pose a threat to urban green space. However, the literature on the compact city approach often lacks specific suggestions for urban green space conservation and planning. Provision of urban green space in compact city environments and during densification processes is described as a major challenge. Loss of private urban green space rarely seems offset by provision of more public green space. Several ways are identified to deal with these challenges, while also highlighting research gaps e.g., as to how loss of green space quantity can be offset by increased green space quality.
In this paper we explore whether the enhancement of urban ecosystem services through large-scale, metropolitan tree-planting initiatives is being planned and executed as a component of traditional municipal government or represents new, transdisciplinary strategies in environmental governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with stakeholders in six major cities (n = 58) we further explore institutionalization of these initiatives and relationships. While much current discourse posits government cannot "go it alone" in providing preventative, "front-end" solutions to complex environmental problems, we found the public sector dominant in the visioning, planning, and management of these green infrastructure initiatives and the role of the private sector to be minimal. We also found that, despite this dominance, the initiatives had limited success in becoming institutionalized. This dichotomy reflects that while discourses labeling the public sector unable to grapple with complex environmental issues and the private sector dominant in environmental governance regimes are premature, institutionalizing the solutions into the machinery of government remains a contested arena.
Environmental Policy Failure: The Australian Story reviews some of Australia’s most critically challenging environmental issues of our time and assesses the capacity of contemporary policies to solve them. It reveals, case by case, the endemic failure of environmental policy under both Labor and conservative governments across many generations, and assesses the prospects for a more ecologically sustainable future.
Since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, counting and mapping have come to dominate international debates around biodiversity protection. With the emergence of the Ecosystem Services concept, these counting and mapping efforts are increasingly imbued with an economic logic that argues that to save biodiversity, its goods and services must be given monetary value. This article offers a critical engagement with the Ecosystem Services discourse and the way it translates the diversity of nature into a single measure—a “currency”—to be included in systems of exchange. We argue that this conception of biodiversity is too narrow and potentially detrimental because it reduces biodiversity to a series of quantifiable fragmented parts that become liable to counting, mapping, and utilitarian use, and because it reduces social–natural relations to market transactions. Subsequently, we outline possibilities for conceiving and living with biodiversity that go beyond relations of counting, mapping, and commodification. It is important that biodiversity knowledge organizations, such as the recently sanctioned Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), take these into account. Conserving a diversity of life requires acknowledging a diversity of values, knowledge and framings of biodiversity, and fostering a diversity of social–natural relations.
Urbanization contributes to the loss of the world's biodiversity and the homogenization of its biota. However, comparative studies of urban biodiversity leading to robust generalities of the status and drivers of biodiversity in cities at the global scale are lacking. Here, we compiled the largest global dataset to date of two diverse taxa in cities: birds (54 cities) and plants (110 cities). We found that the majority of urban bird and plant species are native in the world's cities. Few plants and birds are cosmopolitan, the most common being Columba livia and Poa annua. The density of bird and plant species (the number of species per km(2)) has declined substantially: only 8% of native bird and 25% of native plant species are currently present compared with estimates of non-urban density of species. The current density of species in cities and the loss in density of species was best explained by anthropogenic features (landcover, city age) rather than by non-anthropogenic factors (geography, climate, topography). As urbanization continues to expand, efforts directed towards the conservation of intact vegetation within urban landscapes could support higher concentrations of both bird and plant species. Despite declines in the density of species, cities still retain endemic native species, thus providing opportunities for regional and global biodiversity conservation, restoration and education.
Processes of globalisation, initially in the form of European colonisation, have fundamentally shaped the environmental challenges faced by both Australia and New Zealand. The common heritage and proximate geographical position of these two countries explain many of the similarities in their environmental institutions and responses, and international interventions on environmental issues. But there are also important differences between the countries in environmental performance and their engagement with globalisation, differences for which disparities in domestic socio-environmental, economic and political-institutional factors can provide part of an explanation. The political-ideological orientation of governments appears to be one of the more significant factors shaping the countries' environmental development and policies, nationally and on the international stage.
Research on urban forest governance is scarce, despite the current high level of interest in urban forestry.This paper addresses one of the main reasons for this scarcity – poor understanding of what governance is,and how it can be described. We propose a systematic approach to researching urban forest governance,based on a case study framework which provides a way to describe examples clearly, and to comparethem robustly. The paper briefly reviews definitions and debates around governance, before using adescriptive definition as the basis for developing a framework. It then uses five examples from acrossEurope, to illustrate the use of the framework for describing urban forest governance. The analysis reflectson the experience of writing and sharing case studies, to distill out the framework as a research tool, anddiscusses issues arising from the application of the framework and the challenges of standardisation.The paper concludes with reflections on the role of this framework in stimulating comparisons whilemaintaining the flexibility to contribute to individual research needs and traditions.
The public policy arena is a complex framework of actors, politics and instruments. An Introduction to Australian Public Policy, Second Edition examines the broad range of models, influences and players that shape the development of public policy in Australia, and equips students with a working knowledge of both the theoretical underpinnings and real-world challenges of the field. Fully revised and updated, the new edition addresses the diverse approaches to policy formulation required by different practitioners and institutions. Accessible and engaging, this edition includes: a new chapter on policy evaluation; practical exercises on how to write policy briefs and media releases and eleven new, concise case studies from Australia's top public policy practitioners. The book is accompanied by a companion website which contains chapter summaries and a glossary. Widely regarded as the best introduction to Australian public policy available, the book is an essential resource for undergraduate students of politics and policy workers.
Urban greening can enhance sustainability and liveability, through conserving biodiversity, mitigating urban heat and enhancing people’s health and wellbeing. However, urban greening is complex, as it occurs in unique ecological settings, with social, cultural and economic factors shaping the forms it takes. This raises questions about the governance of urban greening, including what counts as ‘good governance’. In this paper, we first outline principles of good governance drawn from the natural resource management context. We then present four urban greening initiatives from Melbourne Australia representing different scales, land tenures and organising structures. Following this, we analyse how governance of the four initiatives addresses good governance principles. Our analysis shows that there are diverse ways in which urban greening can be practiced and governed. The importance of more ‘informal’ initiatives should not be discounted relative to formalised initiatives, as a spectrum of approaches can be seen as strength. Further, in determining what constitutes good governance, the standards against which initiatives are assessed should be tailored to their specific circumstances, and consider impacts to the environment itself. These findings point to good urban greening governance being both situated and principled.
Melbourne's “Greening the West” (GTW) initiative is a successful example of water utilities actively supporting urban greening through facilitating collaboration between stakeholders. GTW was convened by City West Water in 2011, to bring together 23 partner organisations to protect and enhance urban greening to support community wellbeing. This research involved interviews to determine how GTW works, its challenges, factors for success, achievements, areas for improvement, future directions, and implications. It is found that the existence of GTW has resulted in an additional one million trees planted in Melbourne's western suburbs, and has caused a significant cultural shift within local government.
A nature-based approach to climate resilience aims to challenge and re-frame conventional environmental management methods by refocusing solutions from technological strategies to socio-ecological principles such as human well-being and community-based governance models, thereby improving and legitimizing the delivery of ecosystem services (ES). There are, however, many challenges to applying a socio-ecological agenda to urban climate resilience and thereby re-framing ES delivery as community and people focused, a knowledge gap extensively outlined in the environmental governance literature. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this re-assesment of urban environmental governance by examining the City of Melbourne's approach to urban re-naturing governance from a place-based perspective. Here we focus on the city's internationally-acclaimed urban forest strategy (UFS), investigating how and to which extent the governance arrangements embedded within the UFS draw strength from diverse perspectives and allow for institutional arrangements that support “situated” reflexive decision making and co-creation. We find that Melbourne's UFS governance process fosters green placemaking by re-focusing climate adaptation solutions from technological strategies to situated socio-ecological principles such as human well-being and community-based decision making. In this sense, this case provides valuable insight for the broader UGI governance field regarding the opportunities and challenges associated with a socio-cultural approach to urban re-naturing and ES delivery.
This review examines two new socio-ecological imperatives that have the potential to reshape planning practice and policy: urban climate governance and governance for resilience. The roots of the new imperatives lie in international city collaborative networks funded by philanthropy organisations that operate at city scale. City networks operating at the metropolitan scale raise issues for Australian cities with distributed governance. This practice review considers the early manifestation of both imperatives in what might be termed ‘policy experiments’ in Australia’s two largest cities: the new climate governance framework emerging through the City of Sydney’s collaboration with the C40 network and the resilience regime being shaped by the City of Melbourne’s partnership with Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient 100 program. Whilst our early analysis has accentuated the positive to some degree, pointing to different, if preliminary, forms of success in both Sydney and Melbourne, the limits and frustrations that present in both contexts cannot be discounted. Urban planners in many world cities and regions will need to consider and possibly absorb these new agendas of urban climate governance and governing for resilience driven by international city collaborative networks.
Cities are rapidly expanding world‐wide and there is an increasing urgency to protect urban biodiversity, principally through the provision of suitable habitat, most of which is in urban green spaces. Despite this, clear guidelines of how to reverse biodiversity loss or increase it within a given urban green space is lacking.
We examined the taxa‐ and species‐specific responses of five taxonomically and functionally diverse animal groups to three key attributes of urban green space vegetation that drive habitat quality and can be manipulated over time: the density of large native trees, volume of understorey vegetation and percentage of native vegetation.
Using multi‐species occupancy‐detection models, we found marked differences in the effect of these vegetation attributes on bats, birds, bees, beetles and bugs. At the taxa‐level, increasing the volume of understorey vegetation and percentage of native vegetation had uniformly positive effects. We found 30–120% higher occupancy for bats, native birds, beetles and bugs with an increase in understorey volume from 10% to 30%, and 10–140% higher occupancy across all native taxa with an increase in the proportion of native vegetation from 10% to 30%. However, increasing the density of large native trees had a mostly neutral effect. At the species‐specific level, the majority of native species responded strongly and positively to increasing understorey volume and native vegetation, whereas exotic bird species had a neutral response.
Synthesis and applications . We found the probability of occupancy of most species examined was substantially reduced in urban green spaces with sparse understorey vegetation and few native plants. Our findings provide evidence that increasing understorey cover and native plantings in urban green spaces can improve biodiversity outcomes. Redressing the dominance of simplified and exotic vegetation present in urban landscapes with an increase in understorey vegetation volume and percentage of native vegetation will benefit a broad array of biodiversity.
Aim
Although urbanization impacts many species, there is little information on the patterns of occurrences of threatened species in urban relative to non‐urban areas. By assessing the extent of the distribution of threatened species across all A ustralian cities, we aim to investigate the currently under‐utilized opportunity that cities present for national biodiversity conservation.
Location
A ustralian mainland, T asmania and offshore islands.
Methods
Distributions of A ustralia's 1643 legally protected terrestrial species (hereafter ‘threatened species’) were compiled. We assessed the extent to which they overlapped with 99 cities (of more than 10,000 people), with all non‐urban areas, and with simulated ‘dummy’ cities which covered the same area and bioregion as the true cities but were non‐urban. We analysed differences between animals and plants, and examined variability within these groups using species accumulation modelling. Threatened species richness of true versus dummy cities was analysed using generalized linear mixed‐effects models.
Results
A ustralian cities support substantially more nationally threatened animal and plant species than all other non‐urban areas on a unit‐area basis. Thirty per cent of threatened species were found to occur in cities. Distribution patterns differed between plants and animals: individual threatened plant species were generally found in fewer cities than threatened animal species, yet plants were more likely to have a greater proportion of their distribution in urban areas than animals. Individual cities tended to contain unique suites of threatened species, especially threatened plants. The analysis of true versus dummy cities demonstrated that, even after accounting for factors such as net primary productivity and distance to the coast, cities still consistently supported a greater number of threatened species.
Main conclusions
This research highlights that A ustralian cities are important for the conservation of threatened species, and that the species assemblages of individual cities are relatively distinct. National conservation policy should recognize that cities play an integral role when planning for and managing threatened species.
Economic metaphors – including natural capital, natural assets, ecosystem services, and ecological debt – are becoming commonplace in environmental policy discourse. Proponents consider such terms provide a clearer idea of the ‘value’ of nature, and are useful for ensuring the environment is given due attention in decision making. Critical discourse analysis highlights the ideological work language does; the way in which we think, write, and talk about the environment has important implications for how it is governed. Consequently, the widespread use of economic metaphors is politically significant. This article discusses how metaphors have been analysed in environmental policy research, surveys the use of prominent economic metaphors in environmental policy, and considers the politics associated with such terms. The uptake of various economic metaphors represents a form of reverse discourse, varies in politically significant ways, and narrows the terms of environmental debate.
Current policies and practices in biodiversity conservation have been increasingly influenced by neoliberal approaches since the 1990s. The authors focus on the principle of transparency as a self-proclaimed basis of neoliberal environmental governance, and on the role of standardized science-based measurements which it purportedly affords. The authors introduce the term 'measurementality' to signify the governance logic that emerges when transparency comes to stand next to effectiveness and efficiency as neoliberal principles and to highlight the connections that are forged between economic, managerial, and technocratic discourses. The example of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is used to discuss the role of measurementality in global biodiversity governance. The analysis suggests that IPBES aims to coordinate the science-policy interface in order to optimize the generation of user-friendly knowledge of those elements of biodiversity that are considered politically and economically relevant: at the current economic juncture, these being in essence ecosystem services. Based on these findings, the authors proceed by critically reflecting on the ways in which the measurementality logic of IPBES may not only result in an impoverishment of the biodiversity research agenda, but also in an impoverished understanding of biodiversity itself. To conclude, the authors argue that measurementality is part and parcel of the neoliberal paradigm in which science produces the raw materials for subsequent control and exchange and that, as a result, the intersection of science, discourse, policy, and economics within these governance systems requires sustained critical scrutiny.
The restoration of Melbourne's Merri Creek demonstrates the potential for achieving environmental improvements through a process that integrates the technical, ecological and social aspects.
Sustainable development, although a widely used phrase and idea, has many different meanings and therefore provokes many different responses. In broad terms, the concept of sustainable development is an attempt to combine growing concerns about a range of environmental issues with socio-economic issues. To aid understanding of these different policies this paper presents a classification and mapping of different trends of thought on sustainable development, their political and policy frameworks and their attitudes towards change and means of change. Sustainable development has the potential to address fundamental challenges for humanity, now and into the future. However, to do this, it needs more clarity of meaning, concentrating on sustainable livelihoods and well-being rather than well-having, and long term environmental sustainability, which requires a strong basis in principles that link the social and environmental to human equity. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
The failure of top-down imposed institutional reform for metropolitan areas in the western world has called for new conceptions of institution-building. A bottom up, governance type approach is now considered in various countries which focuses on flexible, voluntary and partnership elements of collective action through which institution is no longer considered as a ready-made object but as a process. A large part of the literature insists upon the effectiveness of this approach through the search for consensus and highlights its internal elements as conditions of success. However, this conception forgets the political and ideological dimensions of institution-building and, consequently, the likely conflicts and obstacles unresolved by governance. This article discusses the relationships between metropolitan government and governance taking a few western urban areas as examples and questions the apparent success of the ongoing metropolitan experiences.
L’échec des réformes institutionnelles imposées d’en haut dans les régions métropolitaines du monde occidental appelle une nouvelle conception de la formation des institutions. Une approche de type gouvernement, par le bas, centrée sur les éléments d’action collective flexibles, volontaires et en association, dans laquelle l’institution n’est plus considérée comme un objet tout fait mais comme un processus est maintenant envisagée dans certains pays. Une grande partie de la littérature insiste sur l’efficacité de cette approche par une recherche du consensus et souligne que les éléments internes sont la clef du succès. Néanmoins, cette théorie oublie les dimensions politiques et idéologiques de la formation des institutions et, conséquemment, les conflits probables et les difficultés non résolues par le gouvernement. Prenant quelques régions urbaines comme exemples, cet essai discute des relations entre gouvernement métropolitain et gouvernance et questionne le succès apparent des expériences métropolitaines en cours.
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