Germany’s capital Berlin will serve as a testing ground for a European project backed by online retailer Amazon.com to work out how best to revive and expand city green spaces, which can help protect residents from rising heat and floods. From June, environmental charity The Nature Conservancy (TNC) will work with the west Berlin district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf to map its surface and put together a plan to plant more trees, grass and flowers, and restore wetland areas.
Amazon will provide 3.75 million euros ($4 million) for the work to reduce climate change risks and boost species biodiversity in three urban areas in Germany over the next five years, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “The people of Berlin are experiencing climate change first-hand – with urban floods and extreme heat events in the past years,” said Ulrich Heink, director of the nature conservation department for Berlin’s Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. Just in 2019, Berlin suffered floods when Storm Axel brought heavy rainfall in May, and then experienced at least 500 deaths linked to summer heatwaves, pushing the city state to declare a climate emergency.
TNC is already working with about 25 cities in North America and Asia on similar programmes to create more space for nature. Researchers, meanwhile, have urged municipal authorities to ensure the benefits of urban greening efforts are spread fairly and do not favour only rich neighbourhoods, as often happens when urban projects are led by private developers.
Source: Reuters
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