Green Infrastructure is Critical Infrastructure
Building with Nature are calling for UK developers and planners to value green infrastructure as critical infrastructure, delivering nature-based solutions that build climate resilience, levelling-up on community health and wellbeing, and securing biodiversity and nature recovery in development.
The British summer has shown us the impact of extreme weather, with record high temperatures, drought, fires and flash flooding being felt by people and wildlife across the UK. This has highlighted an urgent need for the UK’s built environment to be more climate resilient and to provide much needed solutions to the impacts of extreme weather events. High-quality green infrastructure can respond to the challenges of extreme weather in multiple ways; creating ‘sponge cities’ that can better manage flood water, soaking up sudden downpours more effectively, and improving water quality, offering climate-resilient planting which provides shade and urban cooling, supporting people and wildlife through extreme temperature events.
To deliver climate resilient development, the built environment sector must transition rapidly to delivering high-quality green infrastructure as the norm. Developers need to be ready to deliver high-quality development that responds to the national policy agenda, not just on climate resilience, but also on Biodiversity Net Gain and nature recovery, accessible natural greenspace and sustainable water management.
If the whole design team are on board from the start of a project, green infrastructure is a relatively low-cost and easy to deliver nature-based solution, but the multiple benefits of green infrastructure are not yet well understood across the sector and too often the natural environment is only considered at the end of the design process. Building with Nature are here to support developers and planners to better understand, design and deliver high-quality green infrastructure across a range of development contexts.
To respond to the need for all built and natural environment professionals to broaden their skillset and understanding of how to deliver nature-based solutions, Building with Nature are drawing on their evidence-based, industry-tested green infrastructure Standards Framework, to launch a new green infrastructure training course, providing industry with clear guidance on best practice in delivering high-quality green infrastructure.
Where the Building with Nature Standards Framework is already being used by developers and planners, it is supporting effective designs for nature-based solutions. Cornwall Council have been working with Building with Nature since 2018 and recently received a Building with Nature Design Award for the masterplan for Langarth Garden Village. Adam Birchall Head of Planning and Housing Policy at Cornwall Council explained
“Working with the Building with Nature Standards enabled our design team to work from the landscape upwards, creating a new community that sits within a biodiverse and hard-working landscape. The proposed scheme makes the most of the natural environment; maintaining existing and creating new Cornish hedges, planting trees, creating diverse, natural green space for leisure, sport, play, food growing, wildlife and nature.”
With the proposals for Langarth Garden Village, Cornwall Council are valuing green infrastructure as critical infrastructure and recognising the multiple benefits of applying a nature-rich approach to development.
BwN Assessor Jenny Stuart, Cornwall Environmental Consultants and Birgit Höntzsch, Senior Project Lead, Sustainable Development and Innovation, Cornwall Council. The council are working closely with Jenny to ensure the development of Langarth Garden Village meets the BwN Standards