Edinburgh - NbS enhancing health, wealth and sustainability

Key documents for green space and NbS at local level are the Local Development Plan and the Open Space Strategy. The Local Development Plan seeks to protect and enhance the environment and address the challenge of climate change. This will be partly achieved by using new development projects to enhance the green network. The Plan also identifies areas for conservation, and the different functions and benefits of urban green space are considered in terms of their contribution to the environment as well as their social and economic value.

The CEC’s Open Space Strategy seeks to address the main challenges by promoting healthy lifestyles, mitigating and adapting to climate change and making good use of land by ensuring the provision of new open spaces, often as part of new developments. This will help compensate for the decrease in financial resources available for new green spaces. The Strategy also seeks to create or improve access to existing spaces, as well as making strategically significant improvements to such spaces, and includes a proposal to increase the number of allotments and community gardens. As an example, the National Health Service Lothian proposes the creation of new community gardens as part of a redevelopment masterplan at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside. Encouraging small-scale communal food growing areas in tenement backgreens (shared green spaces behind tenement squares), often facilitated by the Edinburgh Community Backgreens Initiative, can help meet sustainability and health objectives.

Edinburgh’s green network forms part of a wider Central Scotland Green Network (CSGN), which is identified as a national development in the National Planning Framework. The Edinburgh and Lothians region covers about 171 500 ha, and its Forestry and Woodland Strategy 2012–2017 Vision aims to create expanded networks of woodland by 2050. This will contribute to a strong, sustainable economy and is an important element of a healthy, resilient environment as well as playing a major role in the quality of community life.  There is a five-year target to support the creation of at least 180–250 ha of new woodland each year across the region and to improve the woodland habitat network (although most of the opportunities for this are in the surrounding regions). In terms of climate change, the strategy seeks to promote woodland management and creation as a key component of sustainable flood management initiatives, while using both the expanding woodland cover and compensation of any woodland losses to development by means of new planting, to increase carbon sequestration and reduce net carbon emissions.

Sustainable Edinburgh 2020 (SE2020) also provides opportunities for NbS, with its vision of Edinburgh as a ‘low carbon, resource-efficient city, delivering a resilient local economy and vibrant flourishing communities in a rich natural setting’, where people have easy access to green space and natural resources and protected and conserved.