During our involvement along with another experts in the second preparatory lab of the “4th edition of Madrid Cities Forum”, discussion of the organisation of this two yearly meeting was focused on urban renaturalisation and the need to increase cities resilience through Nature-Based Solutions.
Some of the conclusions reached during debating are that cities are disconnected from natural environment and in many cases they are also detached from peripheral realities. This leads to the need of enabling an appropriate ‘strategic planning’ and efficient communication to “make progress towards a regenerative system” more similar to how nature works.
Our Executive Director, David Álvarez, highlighted the key role that natural capital approaches and its associated accounting plays in the understanding the value that nature provides to cities. In this regard, he stated that work under way to develop environmental accounting models and growing or wealth indicators that go beyond GDP at European and global scales, to help people to understand the value of nature. David also emphasized that important training and dissemination work is needed so that the relevance that natural assets and ecosystem services that environment provides gets across to society and business sector. “ We are not talking about profound changes, but to have a range of basic knowledge to integrate biodiversity. Technical capacity exists and we know a lot so that what it is needed is the willingness to chage”, he outlined.
Read the whole article published in Ciudad Sostenible (page 36).
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