Barcelona Nature Plan 2021-2030

Margarida Parés and Coloma Rull
Posted on: 6/30/2023 - Updated on: 6/30/2023

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CAKE Team

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Abstract

The Barcelona Nature Plan 2030 is a strategic, participatory tool that defines and sets out the goals and commitments of the municipal government to increasing the city’s green infrastructure, to conserving biodiversity and to how city residents can find out about, enjoy and improve urban nature and take care of it.

In 2013 Barcelona launched the Green Infrastructure and Biodiversity Plan 2020, which has been the roadmap in recent years. Then, in 2017, the City Council approved a government measure entitled the Urban Green Infrastructure Promotion Programme, which set out the plan’s commitments. The need to update, confirm and reinforce the commitments together with the current situation has made it all the more necessary for a new plan to be drafted which sets out the main greenery and biodiversity lines of action over the coming years. This new plan is called a Nature Plan to give the concept more communicative power and express the relationship between urban nature and the Earth’s nature, as well as Barcelona’s commitment to global ecological challenges.

The Covid-19 situation and climate emergency have put the focus on the importance of nature in cities, as support for people’s physical and emotional health. It has demonstrated the value of free, clean air, of silence and vegetation. And city residents have discovered that the city has an extremely rich range of flora and fauna they can enjoy. That has been accompanied by increased awareness of the need to preserve nature, as there is no doubt that its alteration is harming humanity.

In this context cities have to play an active and committed role in relation not just to people’s health but also conserving the Earth’s biodiversity. Moreover, it is an internationally acknowledged fact that the functions and benefits of urban greenery make enhancing it one of the main strategies for adapting cities to tackle climate change. Consequently, one of the main measures in Barcelona’s Climate Emergency Declaration, issued on 15 January 2020, has to do with conservation and increasing urban green infrastructure.

The Barcelona Nature Plan 2021-2030 consists of a strategy for the next 10 years, divided up into three lines and two cross-cutting areas with a total of 20 actions and 100 projects, with the first Action Programme from 2021 to 2025 under which 10 priority or lead projects will be implemented.

The plan is available in English (attached), Spanish and Catalan.

Citation

Margarida Parés and Coloma Rull. (2022). Barcelona Nature Plan 2021-2030. Area of Urban Ecology and Barcelona City Council. 

Affiliated Organizations

Area of Urban Ecology and Barcelona City Council

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