Cities are frequently centres of innovation and change, which can help to reduce resource use and improve human well-being. Biodiversity and ecosystem services in and around cities can support activities such as service delivery and poverty alleviation by providing local livelihoods and food, and resilience to environmental shocks. Existing natural capital presents significant opportunities for African cities to adopt infrastructure and urban servicing approaches that enable the protection and maintenance of natural resources and ecosystem services. However, these opportunities are frequently overlooked or underutilised by local government officials, and Africa is no exception.
In 2014, ICLEI Africa, funded by SwedBio, kick started the Urban Natural Assets (UNA) programme. The programme has been developed over nearly a decade and is implemented by ICLEI’s Cities Biodiversity Center (CBC), hosted by ICLEI Africa. It was designed to support local governments in Africa in addressing the daily challenges they experience around protecting and revitalising their urban natural assets. It specifically sought to improve human well-being, contribute to poverty alleviation and build climate resilience through integrating nature-based solutions (NBS) into land-use planning and decision-making processes through a multi level governance approach. The almost decade-long UNA programme has seen the spin off of methods and approaches through which best practices spark dialogue and multi-stakeholder engagement at the local level. These have all been geared towards inclusive, sustainable development with the overall aim of mainstreaming nature based solutions in decision making processes. The learnings from the previous phases have been consolidated, and serve as the basis of the current phase’s methodology, which adopts a human rights based framework.
This phase of UNA mainstreams human and gender rights along three key urban pillars of governance, planning and finance. Using unique entry points to onboard human and gender rights discourses, UNA explores the vernacularisation of human rights in global south contexts, prioritising representation, the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems and understanding and breaking down power dynamics in NBS programmatic interventions. This methodology interrogates key elements of inclusion, participation, accountability, non-discrimination, equality and empowerment to foster the link between development and rights, on the one hand. On the other hand, it provides evidence of rights based approaches as key to mainstreaming NBS in urban nature.
