Good practice:

Manual for Creating Evidence-Based Green Infrastructure Strategies and Action Plans

This manual is the final output of the MaGICLandscapes INTERREG Central Europe project. It is the culmination of research, consultations and field-testing of various tools created within the project to aid in producing green infrastructure strategies and supporting action plans. The manual is based on the experiences, findings and lessons learnt by ten partners across five central European countries applying those tools to develop their own green infrastructure strategies and action plans for nine case study areas in cooperation with a wide range of stakeholders and decision-makers. The purpose of this manual is to enable and encourage planners, decision-makers and stakeholders alike to plan for and implement green infrastructure using a suite of interconnected tools operating at different spatial scales and aimed at delivering the greatest public benefit possible when investing and planning for green infrastructure and contributing to sustainable development.
It enables various sectors, such as city, regional and local planning, water management, forestry, agriculture and nature protection authorities, to identify shared objectives and deliver measures that meet common objectives and needs for their sectors. The manual outlines the reasons for developing a GI strategy and how it should be structured, methodologies for transnational/regional/local GI mapping and functionality assessment, a public benefit assessment tool, and case studies demonstrating their implementation.

The good practice was developed within the MaGICLandscapes project, co-financed by the Interreg Central Europe Programme. Resources allocated to develop the activities linked to WPT3 were 575.910 euros.If included in ordinary administrative practices, the practice cost can be zero.

Using the tools and methodologies developed, a strategy/action plan was developed for each of the 9 case study areas.The main issues and challenges for each area were identified, and strategies to solve and minimize them were drawn up using stakeholder engagement in order to include them in municipal policies and plans (e.g. the Metropolitan City of Turin included some of the project results in its new Territorial Plan policies).324 people were trained to use the tools produced by the project.

The main challenges were: to cover the lack of knowledge about BGI, since is fundamental to design a BGI Strategy; to define a common definition of BGI useful to test the available data and their capability to map BGIs; how to use data to BGI assessment at different territorial level.

The manual present various green infrastructure assessment approaches and benefit and show a series of case studies demonstrating how strategies and action plans were developed. With their varied socio-economic and environmental priorities and varied landscapes across 5 different European countries, it is hoped the reader can associate and identify with the case study area strategies and perhaps find inspiration to also implement the green infrastructure concept within their own regions, towns and landscapes and deliver the multiple benefits green infrastructure can provide and meet the challenges and requirements for sustainable development. The project starting from a common definition of the BGIs, then tested if the already available gis maps could be able to support the BGI mapping and assessment and gave information on how to save the gap. Than the case studies are integral part of the manual, because they show how in different areas the BGIs strategies were implemented.