The IUCN assesses that cities offer the potential to create the needed ecological connectivity across fragmented landscapes, lessen per capita environmental footprints, and nurture climate-resilient ecosystems.
By Salam Rajesh
The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)’s analytic assessment ‘Catalysing Biodiversity on Buildings (2025)’ reaffirms that the capacity of cities as landscapes to support biodiversity is accepted as one of the critical steps necessary to halt global biodiversity loss, and to address the triple planetary crisis – global warming, climate change and extreme weather events – and pollution.
The IUCN assesses that cities offer the potential to create the needed ecological connectivity across fragmented landscapes, lessen per capita environmental footprints, and nurture climate-resilient ecosystems.
Importantly, cities create an opportunity to connect humans and nature to an extent unprecedented in modern times with the novel objective to support human health and well-being, community resilience, and social cohesion.
The integration of nature and biodiversity in buildings includes designing green roofs and walls, and incorporating measures to safeguard wildlife, especially birds, against building hazards like reflective surfaces, and special resources such as nesting boxes and refuge for pollinators.
The focus on the building scale is intended to highlight measures that include living architecture (that is, natural-looking green roofs and walls), prioritization of native species, and wildlife-friendly building approaches, according to the IUCN assessment.
Bringing nature into cities offers numerous benefits to humans and biodiversity, IUCN stresses, reaffirming the thinking process that this can contribute to human health and well-being, community resilience, and social cohesion. Urban nature can lessen residents’ environmental footprints, help urban biodiversity thrive, and nurture climate-resilient ecosystems, says IUCN.
This thinking process had developed from the concerns on the crises of climate change and global biodiversity loss that necessitated the creation of new resilient and biodiverse landscapes. Implementing initiatives must emphasize biodiversity-friendly landscapes, large intact habitat cores, and connectivity across the built environment, according to IUCN.
As rapidly increasing global population centres, cities offer an opportunity to connect humans with nature as an aspect of everyday life – a connection that research indicates can have profound positive impacts on human health, well-being, and social cohesion, says the people behind this novel thought process.
The IUCN’s latest assessment is the analysis of biodiversity regulations for buildings site biodiversity regulations, standards, incentives, and metrics through the lens of eight European city case studies.
According to the assessment, the key component of urban biodiversity support at this scale is ‘living architecture’, a term referring to natural-looking green roofs and facades. While ground-level greening, such as parks and urban forests, is essential for overall biodiversity benefit, the report focuses on building-site greening, which can complement ground-based habitats and contribute substantially to urban biodiversity.
The report stresses that developers and municipal guidelines acknowledge the benefits of creating buildings site living architecture as one part of a larger urban ecological system, a stepping stone and connection to specific surrounding habitats to maximize biodiversity support.
As greenery and biodiversity are integrated into buildings, there is a corresponding need to minimize the risks and threats to wildlife at the building scale. This aspect addresses the protection of breeding birds and the growing concern of bird strikes caused by the blinding glare from glass buildings, and the other aspect is to reduce the detrimental effects of light and noise pollution on the wildlife.
While highlighting that the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) during 2022 was a landmark moment for a global commitment to counter growing biodiversity declines, the report stressed that the GBF includes a specific target for the urban areas in the form of its actionable Target 12.
Target 12 was created in recognition of the range of positive effects that nature in cities can provide for human health and well-being, while providing critical habitat for the wildlife and ecological connectivity.
The target includes a specific focus on biodiversity-inclusive built landscapes, where the goal set is in mainstreaming biodiversity conservation and sustainable use within cities, thereby necessitating the adoption of implementing policies and practices at a variety of scales and by a range of stakeholders, according to the report.
Target 12 of the GBF (Enhance Green Spaces and Urban Planning for Human Well-Being and Biodiversity) specifically focuses on increasing the area and quality, and connectivity, access and benefits from green and blue spaces in the urban landscape.
The target further seeks in ensuring biodiversity-inclusive urban planning, enhancing native biodiversity, ecological connectivity and integrity, improving human health and well-being, connection to nature, and contributing positively to the inclusive and sustainable urbanization and the provision of ecosystem functions and services.
This, in its broad aspect, looks at re-designing cities to enable better living conditions punctuated by the ever increasing health risks from extreme weather events and other climate-related implications.
It may be recalled here that Europe’s newly introduced Nature Restoration Law establishes regional priority for the recovery of biodiverse and resilient nature. The law is identified as specifically responding to and implementing the commitments of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the GBF’s Article 8 where it is stated that commencing 1st of January 2031, CBD’s member States shall achieve an increasing trend in the total national area of urban green space, including through the integration of urban green space into buildings and infrastructure, and in the urban ecosystem areas.
Correspondingly, the principle of Biodiversity Net Gain came into effect in England on 12 February last year, and this had inspired discourses and reviews around the world on its potential application as biodiversity policy. The policy mandates that new developments are required to achieve at least 10 percent net gain in biodiversity.
The 10 percent net gain takes into account the projected biodiversity value of the onsite habitat at that time when the development is completed (that is, the post development biodiversity value of the onsite habitat).
Back home in Manipur, city planners under the Imphal Smart City concept is yet to exhibit conformity to this revolutionary thinking process in urban green buildings to achieve several goals including climate mitigation measures locally, and clean, green cities, and support to the wildlife presence in urban landscapes.
It, moreover, may be reflected here that setting a good example for others to follow and replicate positively, the office campus of the Directorate of Environment and Climate Change, located at Porompat in Imphal East District, had been restructured to fit into this new concept of green urban spaces, and green buildings to achieve green, clean, healthy environments.