Living in a neighborhood with lots of trees will make you live longer… or will it? Urban nature is said to bring diverse health, social, economic and environmental benefits to cities and their populations. Understanding the scale of and access to these benefits is important if such nature-based solutions are to be considered as a viable alternative to more traditional grey infrastructure approaches to addressing urban challenges. So how exactly can the impact of nature-based solutions be measured?
In the second episode of the Creating Green Cities podcast, we discuss the topics of monitoring and assessing nature-based solutions. The episode features interviews with Gabino Carballo from the team behind Municipality of Barcelona's "Tree Master Plan" and Hans Pijls from Food for Good, an urban care farm in Utrecht. Our guests tell us how they collect and analyse data to measure the impact of the projects they are working on and highlight challenges they have encountered along the way.

The Creating Green Cities podcast has been created as part of the NATURVATION project and explores urban nature-based solutions across Europe through stories of inspiring innovators who use their passion and creativity to make cities green. The focus of the podcast is on initiatives that bring more nature to the city or enhance existing green urban areas such as parks, vegetation along streets or rivers, green roofs or gardens to deliver multiple benefits to the local population. Five episodes explore different aspects of urban-nature based solutions, such as innovation, business models and financing as well as assessment, monitoring and governance. Interview guests from Barcelona, Budapest, Malmö and Utrecht provide practical insights from their experiences of designing, implementing and maintaining urban nature-based solutions across Europe.

New episodes will be released every two weeks and can be accessed directly below or streamed on popular podcast platforms, such as Spotify, Deezer and Apple Podcasts. The podcast forms part of NATURVATION's free open online 'Urban Nature' course, available on the Coursera platform.

This project has been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 730243.