Resilient and climate responsive cities

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We offer city resilience consultancy that covers the full spectrum of potential climate threats a city faces: this includes ecosystems and green and blue spaces, human safety, natural disasters and climate change, and land degradation. We create urban resilience and climate strategies to enable city-wide collective action towards common goals.

Learn how our City Resilience Index has helped embed resilience in cities around the world.

We work with governments and inter-government organisations to design plans and policies that reconnect citizens to nature, prevent urban sprawl, grow green economies in balance with nature and encourage investment into the supply chain. Using machine learning to establish the commercial viability of major green infrastructure projects, we can quantify the benefits at scale, to incorporate nature – as an equal to grey infrastructure – into scheme designs throughout a city.

Find out more about our resilience and adaptation services

With increasing recognition of the link between financial capital and the natural capital that underpins our economy, we advise multi-lateral banks and investors looking to redirect funding to nature-based solutions. We help to better value and enhance natural assets through funding criteria and open up economic opportunities for women and marginalised populations through nature positive cities.

Learn more about our sustainable development advisory services

Planning and designing resilient, nature positive cities means ‘thinking big’ to expand and protect natural assets. Planting urban forests. Pedestrianising whole districts. Creating new blue-green corridors and wetlands. Large scale passive cooling of surfaces and buildings. Integrated ‘green, blue and grey’ water management.

We seek to embed nature in every urban system, in turn delivering wider benefits of ecosystem services, improved biodiversity, healthier communities, sustainable development and economic growth.

Learn more about our landscape architecture services

Our Global Sponge Cities snapshot uses our land use analysis tool Terrain, to assess how well a city can deal with flooding. It analyses blue and green surfaces alongside soil type and vegetation to calculate the rainfall runoff absorption potential and help us think about how we can enable cities to cope with increasingly heavy rainfall and other climate impacts. By combining water sensitive urban design, natural solutions and integrated flood control planning we help shape more resilient, climate responsive and ‘porous’ cities.

Learn why being “spongy” matters to your city’s resilience

Committing to biodiversity net gain means encouraging nature to flourish whenever we develop the human environment. In the city, this means greening streets, enhancing and connecting green spaces and naturalising urban rivers to improve resilience to climate hazards. We help to map, baseline and monitor biodiversity in early stage land use planning. There is always a way to balance nature positive outcomes with commercial and policy goals.

Read more about our integrated nature solutions