Urban areas occupy less than 1 per cent of the Earth’s land surface but house more than half of its people. Despite their steel and concrete, crowds and traffic, cities and towns are still ecosystems whose condition profoundly marks the quality of our lives.
Functioning urban ecosystems help clean our air and water, cool urban heat islands, and support our well-being by shielding us from hazards and providing opportunities for rest and play.
However, through a process of rapid and unplanned urbanization, humans keep on transforming the natural world and create new realities. Left unchecked, urbanization has devastating impacts on natural ecosystems, which in turn negatively affect the well-being of urban populations.
As cities grow, they take space from agricultural and industrial lands that then need to expand into other ecosystems. Adopting nature-based solutions at the urban level to protect, conserve and restore these degraded ecosystems, and mainstreaming the landscape scale in urban planning are key to reconnect cities with nature and mitigate the impact of climate change on urban communities.
UNEP, through its Generation Restoration project (2023-25), aims to implement a package of measures to address selected political, technical, financial challenges to promote restoration at scale, particularly in urban areas, as a contribution to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the Global Biodiversity Framework.
The project is supporting 8 cities around the world to implement pilot projects to catalyse ecosystem restoration in urban areas:
- Douala in Cameroun is restoring mangroves and setting up of governance structures with the community to ensure their participation in restoration and preservation of ecosystems.
- In Senegal, Dakar-Plateau & Thies are creating a greenbelt and blue-green wedges around the metropolitan region, to allow for species movement between protected lands on the city's outskirts.
- Quezon City in Metro Manila, Philippines, is working with local communities and students to identify urban spaces to transform into restoration areas, and designing of ecological corridors, green spaces and pollinator gardens into the city.
- In India, the city of Kochi is undertaking a canal restoration to improve the water quality of the Vembanad Lake ecosystem, for the benefit of people and the entire basin.
- Sirajganj in Bangladesh is renaturing the city’s river coasts through the creation of a green corridor, which will rehabilitate, restore, and enhance biodiversity around the river.
- The Ecuadorian canton of Samborondon is restoring mangroves along the Daule and Babahoyo river. This activity will re-introduce local mangrove species, remove invasives, and restore natural habitats.
- The capital Mexico City is strengthening citizen participation in promoting ecological restoration, to help the Government bring nature back into the urban environment.
- The Amazonian city of Manaus in Brazil is promoting agroecology in urban and peri-urban agriculture as a nature-based solution to increase food security and reduce pressure on precious nearby forests.
The project is also relying on 11 Role Model cities to Strengthen Advocacy and Share Knowledge as Champions of restoration.
Learn more about our Generation Restoration cities.
