Welcome

This website is an online tool for different cities that brings together City Blues partner cities’ experiences and best practices on how to use nature-based solutions (NBS) and catchment-based approach for urban flooding and stormwater management. You will find information and experiences from financing and planning to implementation, maintenance, monitoring and stakeholder engagement.

City Blues project has received funding from the European Union’s Interreg Baltic Sea Region programme.

What do we talk about when we talk about nature-based solutions?

NBS are multifunctional and cost-effective measures that address societal challenges by protecting, developing or creating ecosystems while promoting biodiversity and human wellbeing. NBS can be for many purposes, but in this website the focus is on NBS for stormwater management. The solutions can vary in shapes and sizes, for example, from rain gardens and bioswales to retentions ponds and alluvial meadows. With nature-based watershed management solutions, we can also renature our cities and make them more livable while tackling several challenges with integrated solutions.

What is City Blues?

In the project City Blues, cities develop plans for their urban waters and green areas to better respond to the negative effects of climate change, like floods and pollution, and create liveable areas for people at the same time.

Growing cities are facing negative effects of climate change, such as biodiversity loss, increased flooding, erosion of the stream banks, and pollution from the stormwater runoff. While the situation has been identified, many cities find it difficult to embark on a path of change.

During the project, we design and implement five different pilots in Aarhus, Malmö, Stavanger, Tampere, and Tartu. We share our learnings in transnational workshops and other events, which you can find on this page.

Using nature-based solutions in stormwater management brings other benefits as well, like better living environment with more species. We want to make the use of NBS and watershed-based thinking mainstream.