What is the main focus of your Expert Group?
The goal of the Green-Grey Infrastructure & Nature-based solutions Expert Group (GGI & NBS EG) is to advance innovation and promote the adoption and up-scaling of nature-based approaches to water management, including hybrid blue-green-grey systems, to strengthen the climate resilience of urban areas, industrial and rural settings, including river basins, while enhancing long-term water security and biodiversity. The GGI & NBS EG will facilitate the development and exchange of new knowledge and the dissemination of best practices to promote GGI and NBS mainstreaming within urban and catchment-scale planning, development, and management strategies.
What are the opportunities and challenges in your field that the Expert group is addressing?
In an era where the existing water infrastructure is degrading and requires replacement, hybrid blue-green-grey and nature-based approaches play a pivotal role in increasing the resilience of water systems to climate change and other anthropogenic pressures. GGI combine natural or semi-natural systems (blue-green infrastructure) with engineered (grey) infrastructure to reduce runoff and improve water quality in urban areas. NBS is an umbrella concept that embeds multiple preceding concepts, including blue, green and hybrid blue-green-grey solutions, within a systematic approach designed to simultaneously achieve multiple environmental, social and economic benefits. NBS can be implemented at multiple scales, including for example wetlands conservation or restoration, the creation of biodiverse urban green spaces, or the management of regenerative agroecological systems in both urban and rural settings. GGI & NBS can improve water management from plot- to catchment-scale, whilst concomitantly contributing to climate resilience, carbon sequestration, and the preservation of biodiverse natural habitats.
How does your Expert Group plan to achieve its goals, and how will it contribute to Water Europe’s Vision of a Water-Smart Society?
Grey-Green Infrastructure (GGI) and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) play a key role in addressing water-related challenges in human-influenced environments, enhancing resilience to climate change – including extreme weather events – and promoting nature-positive development. Water Europe’s GGI & NBS Expert Group (EG) aims to synthesise existing knowledge and promote further research and innovation on hybrid blue-green-grey and nature-based approaches to water management for creating a resilient urban and rural environment. The EG seeks to promote mainstreaming of these solutions by clearly identifying their role in achieving high-level policy objectives. It also aims to facilitate collaboration among relevant stakeholders, especially in urban planning, rural development, river basin and coastal management, infrastructure innovation, the conservation or restoration of ecosystems and biodiversity, and climate change adaptation. The EG will foster cross-sectoral dialogue and co-create actionable outputs such as technical papers, policy briefs, and webinars. The GGI & NBS EG supports the realisation of the WE Vision by exploring synergies among WE EGs, examining critical research and innovation needs, drawing insights from past experiences and steering progress through targeted research, practice and policy recommendations, and delivering dedicated webinars on thematic topics fully aligned to the wider European Water Resilience Strategy context.
