Biruk Imagnu

A future Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Marsh (“Delta” herein) that supports healthy ecosystems and native species, while also meeting flood risk reduction, water supply, water quality, carbon sequestration, economic, and cultural objectives, requires that appropriate restoration and management actions be taken in the right place at the right time. Geographic setting affects the potential opportunities available—not all actions are suitable everywhere. Physical factors determining what types of activities are appropriate now and in the future include a site’s elevation, degree of tidal and fluvial influence, salinity, soil type, and local effects of climate change, which all vary spatially across the Delta. While there has been considerable progress over the last several decades, continued acceleration of the pace and scale of enhancement actions appropriate to landscape position is needed. Understanding the physical template is necessary for developing strategies that move beyond opportunistic restoration, support resilience over time, and have the potential to connect and magnify benefits across the larger landscape.

A central motivating question for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta science and management community is what should be done, where and when, to support future Delta landscapes that are ecologically and economically viable and resilient to change. Actions must be taken that have the greatest potential for achieving multiple benefits. This is especially important given the urgency to rapidly transition Delta landscapes to address biodiversity loss, erosion of ecosystem resilience, flood risk, water supply reliability, and cultural and economic sustainability. Landscape-scale planning is needed to examine how individual actions add up to meaningful change. Such planning involves figuring out how different areas can provide different functions at different times and helps show how choices made now can help shift trajectories toward desired outcomes. Too often, land use and management decisions are made based on a limited set of objectives or at the site scale, resulting in missed opportunities. Actions (or inaction) should not foreclose on critical opportunities. Moving forward, there is great need to more effectively compare possible future scenarios across a range of ecological and economic factors. This scenario analysis for Staten Island — a large Delta island managed for multiple uses and facing challenges similar to elsewhere in the Delta — provides an approach to help address this need.

SFEI collaborated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to create a guide to incorporating nature into urban sports, from the development of Olympic cities to the design and management of the many sport fields throughout the urban landscape. We applied the Urban Biodiversity Framework developed in Making Nature’s City to the world of sports, with case studies drawn from international sport federations, Olympic cities, and individual sport teams and venues around the world. The guide is part of IUCN’s ongoing collaboration with IOC to develop best practices around biodiversity for the sporting industry.

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Cities will face many challenges over the coming decades, from adapting to a changing climate to accommodating rapid population growth. A related suite of challenges threatens global biodiversity, resulting in many species facing extinction. While urban planners and conservationists have long treated these issues as distinct, there is growing evidence that cities not only harbor a significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity, but also that they can also be made more livable and resilient for people, plants, and animals through nature-friendly urban design. 

Urban ecological science can provide a powerful tool to guide cities towards more biodiversity-friendly design. However, current research remains scattered across thousands of journal articles and is largely inaccessible to practitioners. Our report Making Nature’s City addresses these issues, synthesizing global research to develop a science-based approach for supporting nature in cities. 

Using the framework outlined in the report, urban designers and local residents can work together to connect, improve, and expand upon city greenspaces to better support biodiversity while making cities better places to live. As we envision healthier and more resilient cities, Making Nature’s City provides practical guidance for the many actors who together will shape the nature of cities.