CLEARING HOUSE – Collaborative Learning in Research, Information-Sharing and Governance on How Urban Forest-Based Solutions Support Sino-European Urban Futures

Trees and forests are a proven nature-based solution that contribute to sustainable urban development. Their potential for delivering ecosystem services, enhancing biodiversity and contributing to the wellbeing of urban societies is often underestimated and underused. CLEARING HOUSE provides evidence and tools that facilitate mobilizing the full potential of urban forests as nature-based solutions (UF-NBS) for rehabilitating, reconnecting and restoring urban ecosystems. UF-NBS comprise every measure a city can take to address urban development challenges by deploying tree-based ecosystems.
CLEARING HOUSE will review existing knowledge and will collect new data from large scale analyses as well as evidence emerging from the comparative analysis of ten case studies in Europe and China. Knowledge will relate to the social, economic and policy drivers of UF-NBS, their design and implementation, and their impacts on urban ecosystem and human wellbeing across continents. By relying on early adopted co-design and citizen science approaches, CLEARING HOUSE will ensure that its research programme exactly fits the demand of end-users, and engages stakeholders and scientists in problem-oriented knowledge generation. On the basis of this knowledge, CLEARING HOUSE then develops user-targeted outputs to support cities, planners, business and civil society in implementing UF-NBS, including online decision-support applications, benchmarking tools, and guidelines on the design, governance and management of UF-NBS, and on sustainable business models relating to them. Target group specific communication and dissemination activities complement the project. These include Sino-European science-policy symposia and measures reaching out to citizens including school children.