Climate Change & Resilience

Introduction

Urban Parks are part of the solution for inclusive, resilient and sustainable social and urban development.

Urban Parks have a positive impact by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, capturing find particles, improving air quality, managing storm water, and mitigating the infamous urban heat island effect.

Urban Parks are essential public spaces for cities, where users can build stronger connections, increasing community resilience.

Urban Parks can and should be designed, built, and renovated as flexible and adaptable spaces that allow mixed users and increase resilient green infrastructure of a city, now and in the future.

The new committee, Urban Parks, Climate Change and Resilience, aims to convene a multidisciplinary group to advise cities:

  • Best practices and guidelines to build or renovate urban parks with resilient design
  • Best practices and guidelines to increase community resilience
  • Quantification of urban parks positive impact on climate change, such as carbon sequestration, conservation of local biodiversity
  • Measuring social impact regarding parks infrastructure and programming
  • Indicators for all of the aspects considered above that will help cities establish a baseline of present conditions and assess their improvement with concrete indicators that have been developed or validated by World Urban Parks

Committee Co-Chair

Tanya is the former secretary of environment of Mexico City. Under her leadership, the city issued the first forest carbon and the first green bond as a local government in Latin America and revitalized Mexico City's main urban parks with an inclusive, resilient, and social lens. In 2014, she was elected by the United Nations Secretary-General ban Ki-moon to be one of the 12 members of the UN High-Level Advisory Group for Sustainable Transport. She is currently the managing partner of RESILIO, which provides consulting and implementation for inclusive, resilient and sustainable development best practices.

 

Committee Co-Chair

Kevin is Senior Parks Superintendent with Fingal County Council in Dublin Ireland with responsibility for providing strategic direction and introducing policy initiatives relating to Parks, Green Infrastructure and Climate Change Adaptation.  He is the current President of the Irish Landscape Institute and Chair of World Urban Parks Europe Committee.  Kevin’s career as a Landscape Architect and Environmental Engineer spans 35 years working in local government in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Kevin has a keen interest in and advocates for the use of Ecosystem Services and Nature Based Solutions to address the challenges of increasing urbanisation.

 

Executive Officer

Executive Officer, Gavin White, is from Mars (a small town in Pennsylvania, U.S.A). He lives and works in nearby Pittsburgh. As the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy’s Community Projects Manager, Gavin combines on-the-ground building experience with a passion for public engagement to ensure resident-driven park plans become built projects that provide community and ecological benefits. Most recently, he’s been organizing residents and policymakers to solve one of the city’s major challenges – stormwater management in a changing climate – through the design and installation of green infrastructure in urban parks.
 
Gavin can be reached at ccrc@worldurbanparks.org

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Join

If you are interested in joining the Climate Change & Resilience Committee please contact the Executive Officer, Gavin White at ccrc@worldurbanparks.org