Enhancing Resilience Of Urban Ecosystems through Green Infrastructure (EnRoute) : progress report

EnRoute stands for Enhancing Resilience of urban ecosystems through green infrastructure. EnRoute is a project of the European Commission in the framework of the EU Biodiversity Strategy and the Green Infrastructure Strategy. EnRoute provides scientific knowledge of how urban ecosystems can support urban planning at different stages of policy and for various spatial scales and how to help policy-making for sustainable cities. It aims to promote the application of urban green infrastructure at local level and delivers guidance on the creation, management and governance of urban green infrastructure. Importantly, it illustrates how collaboration between and across different policy levels can lead to concrete green infrastructure policy setting. This report describes the progress made by EnRoute since the start of the project (01/12/2016). EnRoute is testing the MAES indicator framework on mapping and assessment of urban ecosystems in 20 cities across Europe. The report collects the relevant policy questions for these cities with respect to urban green infrastructure and identifies which indicators of the MAES analytical framework can be used to support local policy. The report includes the datasets and models that will be used for an EU wide assessment of urban ecosystems and their services. The report contains a first proposal for an online survey on the functionality of a science policy interface on urban green infrastructure at different governance levels. The report describes the contributions of EnRoute to other initiatives: update of the MAES indicator framework for ecosystem condition, the task force on an impact evaluation framework for nature based solutions under Horizon 2020, and the EU urban agenda.