How do we know that our UNPs are working? Key Insights from the Urban Nature Exchange #3

Biodiversity is in crisis globally. EU policies like the Birds and Habitat Directives have contributed to slowing this decline but, ultimately, have not been able to reserve the crisis across Member States. The Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) has come into effect making it a legal requirement for member states to reverse this decline though large-scale ecosystem protection and restoration. This includes a requirement for ecosystem protection and restoration in urban areas.

Urban areas have the potential to play a significant role in restoring biodiversity and Urban Nature Plans (UNPs) are a key mechanism for strategically embedding nature restoration into urban planning in a way that also addresses urgent societal challenges such as a social justice. To understand how effective a UNP is, there is a need to monitor the impacts, not only in relation to the social and economic impacts on human populations, but also the impacts on biodiversity within cities.

Part of NRR statutory requirement will include evaluation of two parameters in relation to change in the state of urban nature: change in urban greenspace area and change in tree canopy area. Whilst these represent an interesting measure of the state of urban greenspace, alone, these two indicators may not be sufficient to support cities in understanding how their UNPs and associated actions impact biodiversity. To explore this further, academics from the University of East London’s Sustainability Research Institute ran an Urban Nature Exchange (UNE) with the UNP+ partner cities to explore their experiences with biodiversity assessment.

Key learning outcomes from the UNE emerged in relation to three experiential questions discussed by the cities:

Q1 - What are your current approaches to biodiversity monitoring/evaluation?

• Cities appear to have a range of capacities and resources to dedicate to biodiversity monitoring. Some cities being at a very early stage and others with comprehensive monitoring approaches. Nevertheless, they all have barriers.
• Generally, cities have most success with citizen science approaches and monitoring on public sites.
• Citizen science is a key mechanism being used by cities to generate biodiversity data. This can take the pressure off a municipality from delivering all monitoring, and engage citizens in the natural environment. However, it needs to be standardised and repeatable to act as a robust indicator and it needs to be paired with other indicators to understand better what policy/management decisions are driving change.
• Resource centres can be used for training citizen scientists and internal staff - these then can become the trainers to train others in tested and robust monitoring protocols. Budgets such as education budgets can be repurposed as a way to deliver this survey skills training.
• Cities that are more advanced in terms of biodiversity monitoring are now looking to implement a more advanced ‘biodiversity footprint’ monitoring approach that considers the city’s broader ecological impact.

Q2 - Why do you want to measure biodiversity/ what questions do you want to answer by measuring biodiversity?

• Cities want to generate biodiversity baselines and gather holistic biodiversity data beyond just greenspace area.
• There were a range of motivations cited for monitoring biodiversity by city authorities. These included: gathering a baseline from which to measure change; communicating/demonstrating biodiversity/nature value and impacts (e.g. citizens, external, inter-departmental); community engagement (involve citizens in nature stewardship); raising ambitions for greening/biodiversity; transparency and accountability of council actions; evaluating change in relation to policy decisions.

Q3 - What are the challenges/barriers to achieving this?

• Cities have a spectrum of challenges – from some wanting to generate ‘basic’ and centralised data, to others wanting to advance to next level evaluation.
• Using comprehensive indicators can be very resource intensive. This is a big commitment when there is a risk that the outcome might not be as good as hoped.
• Political buy-in is critical. Where there is political buy-in to the importance of biodiversity in cities, funding for monitoring can be prioritised, making it possible to utilise more comprehensive indicators (e.g. Biodiversity Indices).
• Political cycles can be a real challenge as budgets and commitments can change making consistency of long-term monitoring problematic.
• Data managed and interpretation by skilled staff is a direct need for monitoring results to be used appropriately and effectively.

The discussions within the workshop were very useful in identifying themes for the UNP+ project to explore in greater detail. This included aspects such as: dealing with fragmented data, exploring how to generate support in gathering data, examples of ‘repurposed’ budgets for identification training, challenges of finding expertise, opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, and sharing best practice on developing monitoring metrics. Watch this space as we explore these priorities further in UNP+!

Author: Stuart Connop, University of East London

Publishing date: 19 December 2024