Building biodiversity and climate resilience through smarter urban green infrastructure

Cities worldwide face intensifying pressures from urban growth, extreme weather, flooding, pollution, and biodiversity loss. In Moss, a small Norwegian municipality, planners sought to understand how the city centre’s grey and green spaces could better support climate resilience, biodiversity, and urban wellbeing. This work, conducted by Karen Creagh and our Norwegian colleagues at NaturRestaurering AS, was presented by her at the World Green Infrastructure Congress 2024 in Auckland when she was working with Awa and is available to download below. It assessed habitats, species, and ecosystem services using both the Nature in Norway EcoSyst and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) TEEB frameworks.

Although around 20% of the city centre provided some ecosystem services, heatmaps revealed major ecological gaps. Valuable habitats in mature‑tree parks, semi‑natural pockets of unused land, and the central river and riparian zones were limited and fragmented. Smaller vegetated areas like verges, roundabouts, and lawns contributed little, having been maintained for amenity rather than ecological function. Cultural ecosystem services were also sparse in the dense centre, though nearby coastal and freshwater environments offered more diversity.

Decades of densification have prioritised infrastructure efficiency over natural systems, leaving narrow corridors of hard surfaces and confining meaningful biodiversity to isolated patches such as older parks. Pollinating insects cannot move across the cityscape, and the list of avifauna on the threatened species list continues to grow. The lake, river, and coastline have declining qualities as habitats for aquatic life. Invasive species are spreading, taking hold of shorelines and open meadows.

A facilitated workshop with municipal teams used the assessment results to identify opportunities for a connected network of ecosystem services and to explore how ecological function could increase even as density continues.

The study highlighted the untapped potential of municipal land and buildings, their roofs, terraces, walls, and road shoulders as green infrastructure. When strategically deployed, nature‑based solutions can rapidly enhance biodiversity, improve climate resilience, strengthen community wellbeing, and increase the long‑term value of dense urban environments. This integrated approach offers a pathway for Moss – and cities globally, including in Aotearoa New Zealand – to build greener, healthier, climate‑ready urban centres.

Contact Michael Hall (michael.hall@awa.kiwi) at Awa to find out more about how we help clients enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services, or Karen Creagh (karen@natres.no) if you want more detail about the study.