• Building-adjacent trees, overall city tree canopy, and green roofs can reduce building energy use and peak demand associated with mechanical cooling, saving Sacramento over $150 million in investment in new power generation.
• Distributed green stormwater features like rain gardens, grassy parks, and natural lakes could help avoid up to 87 percent of the embodied carbon of grey infrastructure, like large concrete basins and tanks, in cities like Ahmedabad, India.
• Street trees could reduce a city’s annual vehicle kilometers traveled equivalent to taking 4,200 cars off the road in 2050 in a city like Austin, leading to $1.5 billion in health benefits.

Despite this immense value, few cities are optimizing their use of nature, especially as a climate and resilience solution. By 2050, the annual global net benefits of urban nature could be $3.1 trillion per year. But the world will need to triple its current level of investment in urban nature to achieve this result. This report arms local policymakers and investors with the information they need to make the case for urgently scaling up investment in urban nature.Momentum is growing to address the urgent challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and rapid urbanization. With cities expected to house 68% of the world’s population by 2050, warming twice as fast as the global average, and disproportionately affected by storms, droughts, and coastal flooding, we need to use every tool at our disposal to ensure a low-carbon, livable, resilient, and equitable urban future.  One frequently overlooked tool with great potential is urban nature — cities’ forests, parks, street trees, green stormwater infrastructure, and bodies of water. The benefits urban nature provides include jobs, higher property values, improved physical and mental health, pollution mitigation, heat mitigation, lower energy bills, safer streets, flood protection, biodiversity, and community connectedness. Strategic and systematic investment in urban nature can unleash these benefits to help cities meet climate, quality-of-life, resilience, and equity goals. But the economic value of these benefits is not always well quantified, and potential funders struggle to build a business case for investments in urban nature. Local governments have to bear most of the costs of providing and maintaining these resources, while property owners, businesses, insurers, and the general public enjoy the benefits. It doesn’t have to be this way. Urban nature is not merely a cost to bear but an enormous investment opportunity. Its many benefits have substantial economic value that outweighs its cost at the city scale, globally, and over time — but we will only realize those benefits with investment. Our analysis found the following- Spending $7 trillion on urban nature globally could create $59 trillion in net benefits between 2023 and 2050 — a benefit-cost ratio of nine-to-one.  By 2050, annual net benefits could be $3.1 trillion per year. • Annual investment in urban nature needs to increase on average to $98 billion, or three times current levels, to achieve these results. (For comparison, this is around how much the European Union spent on renewable energy subsidies in 2019.   

The report highlights the significant benefits of incorporating more nature into urban areas, demonstrating how it can positively impact communities, investors, and the climate by reducing energy consumption, improving air quality, mitigating heat waves, and providing stormwater management solutions. Key points about the report:

  https://unu.edu/article/development-aid-cuts-will-hit-fragile-countries-hard-could-fuel-violent-conflict