CLEARING HOUSE kicks-off in Bonn

It’s finally come home – CLEARING HOUSE KICK-OFF EVENT IN BONN

Photo: Jose Bolaños

After the great news during the final workweek of 2018, the project Collaborative Learning in Research, Information-sharing and Governance on How Urban forests as nature-based solutions support Sino-European urban futures (CLEARING HOUSE) officially launched at the European Forest Institute Bonn office last week on 5 and 6 September.

CLEARING HOUSE is a project on urban forests and nature-based solutions with the aim to enhance the resilience of cities that are facing major environmental, socio-economic and cultural transitions and challenges.

The CLEARING HOUSE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and will run for the next 48 months. The coordinator will be EFI Bonn who will make sure to facilitate a learning environment between 26 partners from Europe and China. It is the first true European-Chinese research and development project on urban forestry, therefore sets a milestone in Sino-European collaboration, and makes it crucial for EFI’s long-term strategy.

CLEARING HOUSE has five main objectives:

• Analyse current frameworks, public perceptions and demand towards UF-NBS (WP1)
• Evaluate impacts on urban societies, including aspects of socio-environmental justice and gender, cost-effectiveness and replicability for diverse contexts (WP2)
• Facilitate a collaborative learning process on UF-NBS, connecting practitioners, businesses, policymakers and scientists (WP3)
• Develop decision support tools and guidelines for cost-effectively expanding, governing and managing UF-NBS (WP4)
• Increase awareness on the benefits of UF-NBS and disseminate it among governments, businesses, civil society and academia (WP5)

The project focusses its efforts on ten local case studies, which are paired based on similar characteristics and challenges. Please see the map for the specific case study cities:

Stay tuned on the coming CLEARING HOUSE website, on our twitter and LinkedIn social media presence! Also, make sure to follow our Resilience Blog on https://resilience-blog.com/category/urban-forestry/ and https://resilience-blog.com/tag/urban-forestry/.

This project has received funding from the European H2020 Research and Innovation programme under the Grant Agreement n° 821242. Several Chinese CLEARING HOUSE partners have also contributed to the funding.