ENHANCING BIODIVERSITY AND SOCIAL INCLUSION BY TRANSFORMING EUROPE’S LIVING ENVIRONMENTS

ongoing

Nature Based Solutions (NBS) can support biodiversity, human health and well-being, climate adaptation and resilience, and can reduce pollution and climate change. In reality, many NBS fail to maximise these benefits or do not work over time, exacerbated by a lack of community involvement. The INNATURE project ambition is to change this and to deliver five diverse demonstration cases across Europe that maximise NBS co-benefits and that will demonstrate best ‘next practices’ in design solutions and processes and upscaling and acceleration of NBS in different contexts. It will do so by bringing biodiversity and people diversity together at all levels (i.e. diverse communities, artists and designers, ecologists, researchers, policy-makers, other stakeholders) and thereby reimagining new (biodiverse, social, cultural and ecological) futures. The New European Bauhaus (NEB) will act as a foundation for the co-production of NBS and all of the INNATURE NBS actions will be NEB ‘by design’, thereby transforming and diversifying existing living environments that will demonstrate how NBS solutions can be inclusive, resilient and adaptable to changes, affecting policy and changing mindsets. More specifically, the INNATURE project will: (1) co-produce and demonstrate NBS that are NEB (New European Bauhaus) ‘by design’ through Eco-Social Living Labs. (2) protect, celebrate and enhance existing local biodiversity through Art Conversations and collaboration and biodiversity actions with local ecologists. (3) ensure long-term resilience of the NBS through a Holistic Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (including citizen science), facilitated by an Integrated Digital Platform. (4) use NBS to re-imagine new living futures in Europe and create a Local Community Economy-Ecology Value Framework; and (5) map these processes and results in a new framework and practical guidelines for ‘NEB-by-design’ NBS, culminating in the INNATURE Pattern Book.