It is now widely acknowledged that to make adequate and timely progress in the direction of biodiversity mainstreaming, three critical aspects – previously overlooked or insufficiently handled by supranational policies – need to be emphasised and further explored in their transformative potential: 1) The establishment and operation of bottom-up and especially City- and Community- driven initiatives, which may adequately complement the Country level National Sustainable Development Plans and Green Growth Strategies; 2) The introduction and refinement of appropriate methodologies, and capacity-building activities, to enable the engagement of all key societal stakeholders (notably including market players, citizens and local government actors) in concerted actions to restore the most compromised elements of the natural environments; 3) Continuous work on enabling nature-based solutions by identifying the connections, and addressing the disconnects, between biodiversity conservation and social, economic, and technological challenges. To meet the requirements of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and of the recent Commission proposal for a Nature Restoration Regulation, the UNP+ consortium proposes a 3-year long action research plan, engaging 11 academic partners and 5 European Cities as “Lighthouse” and “Greening” testbeds, ready to share knowledge and scale up from their ongoing experiences in UNP design and NBS implementation & scaling, to a next-generation strategy for urban and periurban ecosystem transformation, mainstreaming biodiversity, ecosystem services, and natural capital in urban policies and economies through adopting a whole of society approach.

HEART’s integrated approach aims to significantly improve urban health and reduce health disparities through an innovative urban planning methodology that embraces and promotes the policy making of proper Blue-Green (BG)-based technologies with techniques for changing individual -citizens’- behaviour. HEART mainly targets to: (i) monitor and efficiently assess the impact of specific BG-based interventions on Public Health (PH) and Well-Being (WB) through studies to be carried out at both clinical and non-clinical settings, in three European cities, i.e. Belgrade (Serbia), Aarhus (Denmark) and Athens (Greece). This way HEART aims to create evidence-based policy making recommendations that will be addressed to the relevant health authorities of these countries (based on specific KPIs), (ii) change individual -citizens’- health related behaviour, by using emerging ICT-based techniques, (iii) develop robust plans for regenerating and rehabilitating urban ecosystems to improve PH and WB, while in parallel addressing key challenges such as low environmental quality and low biodiversity, resilience to Climate Change and extreme weather conditions, air pollution, undervalued use of space in deprived and residual-values areas leading to health inequalities; (iv) create inclusive and accessible urban environments by systematically implementing gender mainstreaming strategies and new participatory tools (ICT-based) in order to ensure that diverse groups’ needs are properly considered and embedded into urban-regeneration-planning; (v) design urban regenerating plans targeting to deliver cities-for-people: the proposed BG solutions will improve citizens’ quality of life, based on real evidence and co-design processes, as well as stimulating and supporting social inclusivity for all; and (vi) improve urban resilience (operational, social and economic) through interventions designed using a set of urban planning matrices based on stakeholders’ participation. ΗEART is part of the European Urban Health cluster.

EuPOLIS aims to: (a) replace the traditional perception in which engineering systems are built to protect the environment at significant costs. We aim to deploy natural systems to simultaneously enhance Public Health (PH) and Well-Being (WB), and create resilient urban ecosystems at lower Life-Cycle Costs; (b) propose a structured approach to activate the hidden possibilities and services of existing Natural and Engineered urban systems, integrate them and define their joint social, cultural and economic effects, as a main vehicle for Ecosystem Business Services and Investment; (c) regenerate and rehabilitate urban ecosystems, while in parallel addressing key challenges such as low environmental quality, fragmentation and low biodiversity in public spaces, water-stressed resources, undervalued use of space in deprived areas and therefore we improve urban livability; (d) improve urban resilience (operational, social and economic) through interventions designed using a set of proper urban planning matrices, which catalyse stakeholder participation, with a special attention to gender, age and disability perspectives within the process; (e) create inclusive and accessible urban spaces by systematically implementing gender mainstreaming strategies and novel participatory tools into all phases and processes of project development to ensure that the needs of diverse groups are considered. We aim to stimulate active communities’ participation throughout the process; (f) to improve citizens’ quality of life providing them with pleasant socializing open areas that stimulate social exchange and inclusivity; (g) monitor and validate the impact of all interventions to PH and WB of citizens. EuPOLIS solutions will be demonstrated in 4 European cities: Belgrade, Lodz, Piraeus and Gladsaxe. We have also included some follower cities (Bogota, Palermo, Limassol and Trebinje) in order to replicate and demonstrate the advantages of our innovations via mentoring and coaching.

ClimaGen will demonstrate how Climate-resilient regeneration and renaturing for, by and with vulnerable neighbourhoods, can help cities and regions in their transitions towards net-zero. 5 Demonstration cities (Belgrade, Gdańsk, Tartu, Torino, and Trondheim), will implement 25% increased share of newly created and/or restored public green spaces in each city. 4 Replication Cities (Cluj-Napoca, Eindhoven, Gernika and Thessaloniki) will experiment with shorter-term co-creative measures with the same objectives and methods to plan for future implementation of the measures. All 9 cities will run their own Work Packages in ClimaGen, supported by 5 cross-cutting concepts and 4 transversal WPs: ClimaGreens will nurture integrated renaturing measures that create resilience at several scales, and avoid maladaptation in the journey to climate-neutrality. ClimaLabs will provide local and regional collaborative governance, with arts, culture and youth, entrepreneurship and financing, and organisational resilience in long-term planning strategies. ClimaImpact will generate evidence-based decision support and valuation of co-benefits, in easy-to-understand and, where possible, visualised formats. ClimaValue will offer outreach, capacity building and policy guidance, with strategic advocacy together with sister projects and close collaboration with Missions/NEB communities, while an evidence-based ClimaGen Guidance Package will disseminate results and knowledge to cities. City Dialogues and cross-cutting Sense-Making Sessions will support local implementation and common learning. Together these define impact pathways to knowledge sharing, scaling and replication. The ClimaGen Games will tie these activities together with a portfolio of participatory, gamified, citizen-science-based methods to engage all partners and stakeholders in an inclusive manner, and to use their diversity as a strength.

Hamburg (DE), London (UK) and Milan (IT) have decided to create CLEVER Cities. Led by Hamburg, a well-balanced, competent partnership will position the EU as global leader in nature-based solution (NBS) innovation. CLEVER Cities applies a city centric approach, starting by key urban regeneration challenges and employing strong local partner clusters, to foster sustainable and socially inclusive urban regeneration locally, in Europe and globally. We will co-create, - implement, and -manage locally tailored NBS to deliver tangible social, environmental and economic improvements for urban regeneration. We are committed to make the interventions in front-runner cities (FR) cases for successful NBS and prepare robust replication roadmaps in fellow cities (FE), that also have NBS experience and expertise to offer. We will ensure long-term sustainability of actions in FR and FE by initiating urban innovation partnerships that will use SMART city principles to engage residents, establish new governance procedures, generate innovative financing and investment strategies. CLEVER Cities will employ partners’ large global networks to generate rapid and durable uptake of NBS by capacitating businesses and a CLEVER Solutions Basket with innovative technological, business, financing and governance solutions, in Europe and globally. The influential and committed FR will serve as role model for FE and global cities in East Asia and South America. All cities will actively engage in replication, thus, help to meet EU and UN sustainability goals and profile the EU as global leader in green innovation. CLEVER Cities materialises in strong local clusters around FR with partners, which can both support local co-creation as well as transversal activities with specific knowledge and expertise. This makes it a distinct, exciting project that will generate lasting results in cities and deliver a CLEVER Cities package with solutions, guidance and open-sourced data EU NBS reference framework.