Green and blue infrastructure (GBI) has the potential to effectively slow down, halt and reverse the negative effects of human activities on the environment while safeguarding valuable ecosystem services that these natural settings provide, especially in urban areas. The successful implementation of GBI is linked to a variety of factors, especially so the policy and institutional framework in which they are embedded. Acknowledging this potential, this report aims to understand the policy contexts which foster or hinder the uptake and positive impacts of green and blue infrastructure across a range of European cities.

Work Package 3 (WP3) of the ENABLE-project aimed to analyze citizen perceptions of and preferences for various CES provided by GBI. It also identified potential means to integrate such knowledge and information in municipal planning processes. This report presents the research results of the work package.

The capacity of multifunctional natural areas to simultaneously address user preferences, answer municipal needs, and fulfil wider political obligations is far from being fully realised. The present article responds to this situation and highlights the Q-method as an effective approach for assessing and integrating user viewpoints on urban GBI and its benefits in urban decision-making and planning processes.

The circumstances under which different ecosystem service benefits can be realized differ. The benefits tend to be coproduced and to be enabled by multiple interacting social, ecological, and technological factors, which is particularly evident in cities. As many cities are undergoing rapid change, these factors need to be better understood and accounted for, especially for those most in need of benefits. We propose a framework of three systemic filters that affect the flow of ecosystem service benefits: the interactions among green, blue, and built infrastructures; the regulatory power and governance of institutions; and people's individual and shared perceptions and values. We argue that more fully connecting green and blue infrastructure to its urban systems context and highlighting dynamic interactions among the three filters are key to understanding how and why ecosystem services have variable distribution, continuing inequities in who benefits, and the long-term resilience of the flows of benefits.

We are thrilled to announce that the ENABLE project has been awarded the BiodivERsA Prize for Excellence and Impact. This award recognizes the excellent research performed in ENABLE and the impacts that were achieved for both policy and society. As a project partner, Ecologic Institute lead the work assessing the socio-cultural perceptions and preferences of citizens for different forms of green and blue infrastructure and supported the policy and institutional analysis in the project cities as well as the formulation of policy options.

2020: Operationalising EU Policies for Urban Green and Blue Infrastructure. ENABLE Policy Brief 1.

2020: Local Action for Green and Blue Infrastructure – Lessons learned from transdisciplinary and cocreation processes in cities. ENABLE Policy Brief 2.

2020: Green refuges for enabling cities' preparedness for future pandemics and global change. ENABLE Policy Brief 3.

Green and Blue infrastructure (GBI) in cities holds large potential to effectively address emerging global challenges, such as climate change impacts, increasing urbanisation and declining access to nature, as it can deliver multiple societal, ecological and economic benefits in parallel. This multifunctional potential of GBI has only recently begun to gain weight in research, policy and planning and has yet to be fully unlocked. The EU-funded BiodivERsA project 'ENABLE' responds to this gap by utilizing a transdisciplinary systems approach to examine the relationship between social-ecological dynamics and GBI's potential to meet multiple goals, including biodiversity conservation and climate change adaptation. The four-year research project, funded by the BiodivERsA network, is led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre and supported by Ecologic Institute and nine other research partners.