Enhancing urban living: The LIFE Programme’s impact on nature conservation in cities

LIFE is at the cutting edge of the liveable city revolution. In the Lombardy region in northern Italy, for example, the recently completed LIFE in the city project brought students, conservationists and citizen scientists together to protect threatened urban biodiversity in three cities - Milan, Varese and Cassano Magnago.  

The project set out to design and test an ‘innovative, collaborative and participatory model of green urban regeneration for biodiversity conservation’. In just two years it delivered free online training courses on biodiversity and urban greening for teachers, municipal officials, green designers and urban planners. Residents and students created urban gardens and public green spaces, planting local shrubs and varieties of native flowers that encourage pollinating insects. 

Along with Bologna and Madrid, Milan was also involved in VEG-GAP, a three-year LIFE project, to evaluate the impact of planting urban vegetation on air temperature, humidity and pollution levels.  

Based on the results, VEG-GAP built a collaborative online platform for city authorities to plan their own urban vegetation programmes. ‘Urban green spaces have cooling effects on cities’ says the project manager for the Metropolitan City of Bologna Valeria Stacchini. ‘Urban green represents a great opportunity to improve the quality of life in the city.’ 

Meanwhile, in Alentejo, Portugal, LIFE AGUA DE PRATA aims to bring ancient natural underground water sources back to life to irrigate urban green spaces in the regional capital Évora. The recently completed project also encouraged ‘urban farmers’ who grow their own produce to promote climate-friendly, water-efficient irrigation on their plots. 

The showpiece of this project, however, is the restoration of the world-famous 16th-century aqueduct to transport 120,000 cubic meters of water every year from natural springs outside the city.  

With 338 million EU citizens now living in urban areas - more than three-quarters of the total population - the pressure is on to create liveable cities which also help ease the climate and biodiversity crisis. LIFE projects aim to do just that.