Ensuring gold standards are followed for green spaces to help create healthier, more sustainable, and climate-resilient communities
A new paper published in Frontiers in Environmental Science describes a comprehensive menu of standards for green infrastructure in England to help deliver green space that is accessible, connected, multifunctional, and reflects local character.
Here Alison Smith, a Senior Researcher with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, who helped compile the standards, explains how following them can improve overall wellbeing and environmental quality.
Green infrastructure (GI) such as street trees, parks, green roofs and raingardens can play a vital role in keeping our towns and cities clean, cool, safe and healthy. However, GI needs to be carefully planned to make sure we have enough green space for people and nature to thrive. To help local authorities deliver high quality, multifunctional GI that meets local needs as well as national priorities, Natural England has been developing a framework of GI Principles and Standards in partnership with a broad range of researchers and practitioners.
I’ve been working with Natural England to help curate existing standards and guidelines into a comprehensive framework consisting of a ‘Core Menu’ and five ‘Headline Standards’. The Headline Standards have already been released, and now a new paper has been published describing the draft Core Menu to support the delivery.
The Core Menu moves beyond simplistic metrics such as total green space to deliver GI in line with Natural England’s 15 principles.
• Plans should meet the five ‘What’ principles by being accessible, connected, locally distinctive, multi-functional and varied.
• In turn, this should deliver places that meet the five ‘Why’ principles by being nature rich and beautiful, active and healthy, thriving and prosperous, resilient and climate positive, and with improved water management.
• And finally, it should be delivered using the five ‘How’ principles, bringing together a partnership of stakeholders across different sectors to strategically plan GI that is evidence-based and designed to meet local needs, with effective management, monitoring and evaluation.
The paper also shows how these draft standards provide flexibility to help balance national targets on climate, nature and health with the need to meet local needs, constraints and priorities. Crucially, the standards sit within the wider GI framework of supporting tools, advice and guidance, to help planners with limited resources deliver more effective and robust green infrastructure with multiple benefits.
Read the paper in full: A menu of standards for green infrastructure in England: effective and equitable or a race to the bottom?
The paper was co-authored by Alison Smith, also affiliated to Agile, Nature-based Solutions Initiative, and Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery at the University of Oxford, with colleagues from Birmingham City University, the University of Manchester, Natural England and Peter Neal Consulting.
Learn more about the Sprint research that contributed to it: How do we scale up Nature-based Solutions?
