Abstract
Greening cities, meaning the addition of new parks, community gardens, street trees along traffic-impacted roads, green roofs, and green walls, are increasingly important to urban climate change adaptation. In the 2010s, hot summers affected many urban centers across the globe. Next to a more effective CO2 mitigation, adaptation to heat waves and hot summer day and night temperatures seems inevitable and necessary for the health of urban residents. This chapter will present illustrative examples of green solutions that can lower heat, reduce local flooding that is a consequence of heavy rainfall, and enhance outdoor quality time for different groups of urban residents. Results from recent studies will be used to show the quantitative effects of designing and planting green in cities. In addition to clear success stories, this chapter will also discuss the barriers to and failures of nature-based solution projects that must be overcome in a successful green urban future.
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Acknowledgments
Haase’s research was supported as part of the project ENABLE, funded through the 2015–2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, German Aeronautics and Space Research Centre, National Science Centre (Poland), the Research Council of Norway, and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. In addition, Dagmar benefited from the GreenCityLabHue Project (FKZ 01LE1910A) and the CLEARING HOUSE (Collaborative Learning in Research, Information-sharing and Governance on How Urban forest-based solutions support Sino-European urban futures) Horizon 2020 project (No 821242). Haase further contributed to this paper as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project CONNECTING Nature – COproductioN with NaturE for City Transitioning, Innovation and Governance (Project Number: 730222).
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Haase, D. (2022). The Effects of Greening Cities on Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. In: Lackner, M., Sajjadi, B., Chen, WY. (eds) Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72579-2_120
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72579-2_120
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