Green Bonds Funding a Water-secure Future

The AIPH World Green City Awards are designed to champion ambitious nature-orientated approaches to city design and operation. Specifically, they seek to recognise public initiatives relying on a greater use of plants and nature to create better city environments – helping to fulfil local aspirations for improved economic, social and environmental resilience. The awards celebrate innovation, achievement, and commitment to the globally recognised imperative to embrace nature-orientated solutions that harvest the power of plants and associated ecosystems services to help address the major challenges facing cities today – or tomorrow.

AIPH initiated these awards to bring wide recognition to the value of plants in providing solutions for common city problems and create an enabling environment to shape and nurture a strategic shift in city governance and planning.

Entries are now open to cities for the inaugural 2022 edition of the AIPH World Green City Awards. AIPH and partners invite all cities, large and small, to showcase their ambitious actions for nature and enter today!

EIT Climate-KIC partner Dark Matter Labs is exploring the role ‘dark matter’—the invisible structures and infrastructures that shape our systems, like regulation, procurement, contracting and financing mechanisms—must play in driving city transitions

Singapore’s Global Innovation Challenge for Water

In the near future, Kinshasa, like many other cities, is expected to experience higher temperatures, more extreme precipitation and flooding, and more frequent droughts— all of which could make business and industry less productive. These changing conditions are likely to damage infrastructure with potentially catastrophic effects, especially for small-scale farmers and poor city-dwellers, with damage magnified by rapid, poorly planned urbanization.

As populations rise in DRC’s urban areas, especially Kinshasa, and climate change intensifies, the need for practical solutions is clear. By addressing these challenges, Kinshasa can be in the vanguard of the movement toward more sustainable cities.

“People can feed their own families, even if they don't have money to buy food in the market. In their own back yards or on land in their local communities, they can get the nutritious greens they need for their families.”

Food has become a serious need to the Philippines as COVID-19 hit the country. Their government and communities have started a “community gardening" project to recover from the situation.

One of the founding mothers of the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines, Ofelia Bagotlo, describes how community gardens on vacant city plots are providing vital nutrition for the urban poor.

What will our eco-friendly homes of the future look like?

The Guardian's Helena Horton spoke with experts at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) to find out what the eco-friendly house of the future could look like.

Photograph: Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Near or far, the role of forests in securing clean water for residents and the agricultural lands that cities rely on is equally crucial.

Not only is clean, safe, and affordable water essential to human health and well-being, the pandemic reminds us of how critical clean water is to health and hygiene. And yet, the world is on the precipice of a historic global water crisis.

The situation is dire, but one asset is already at our fingertips. Forest can alter the movement, quality, and availability of water. With the majority of the planet’s population inhabiting cities, the connection between cities, water, and forests works at three levels: inner forests, nearby forests, and faraway forests. Here’s how each one protects water in cities, no matter how far away.