Green infrastructure is a planned network of green spaces and other environmental features including street trees, gardens, green roofs, community forests, parks, rivers, canals and wetlands.

Green Infrastructure Partnership

The Green Infrastructure Partnership fulfils a commitment made in the Natural Environment White Paper. The partnership will bring together expertise in civil society, professional bodies, local authorities, developers, planners and social housing enterprises, among others to see what more can be done.

• Richard Benyon’s speech at the launch of the Green Infrastructure Partnership.

The scope of our work programme is yet to be fully agreed with partners, but is likely to include:

• Finding ways to provide green infrastructure in towns, cities and rural areas.
• Addressing barriers that might prevent this progress.
• Developing an evidence base on the condition of England’s green infrastructure and how it meets the needs of communities.
• Demonstrating the many benefits that green infrastructure can bring.
• Looking into how communities, planners and decision-makers can best be supported in designing and developing green infrastructure.
• Helping people to quantify the costs and benefits of investing in green infrastructure and make the case for green infrastructure projects.

Green infrastructure – background information

Green infrastructure can provide many social, economic and environmental benefits close to where people live and work including:

• Places for outdoor relaxation and play.
• Space and habitat for wildlife with access to nature for people.
• Climate change adaptation – for example flood alleviation and cooling urban heat islands.
• Environmental education.
• Local food production – in allotments, gardens and through agriculture.
• Improved health and well-being – lowering stress levels and providing opportunities for exercise.
• Reducing air, water and noise pollution.
• Providing green transport routes to promote walking and cycling.
• Improving quality of place and screening unsightly development.
• It can also play a major role in attracting economic growth and investment, increasing land and property benefits, promoting tourism, and increasing business productivity.

Although we don’t have an overall picture of the current state of green infrastructure, we do know that there are areas where green infrastructure needs to be improved to regenerate derelict land and tackle environmental inequality.

Recent trends are not all positive – there is evidence that Local Authorities are replacing large mature trees with smaller species that provide fewer ecosystem goods and services– and until recently the paving of front gardens was contributing to urban surface water risk.

Climate change will also increase the need for green infrastructure to cool the urban heat island and absorb and drain increased peak rainfall.

Key facts & figures

• Research from the University of Manchester suggests that green cover in urban areas may need to increase by 10% to offset predicted temperature rises.
• Vegetation, in the form of trees, parks and gardens, but also green roofs and walls, can lessen flooding by increasing rainfall capture.
• A recent study of over 350,000 people published in the Lancet found that people who lived near to green space lived longer, with significantly reduced health inequalities, even when all other factors were accounted for.
• People in deprived areas are nearly six times less likely than those in affluent ones to describe their area as ‘green’.
• One in six urban local authorities still say that their green space is declining.

Key publications

• Forest Research report on the benefits of Green Infrastructure (Forestry Commission website)

Further information

• Newlands – a green infrastructure case study (Forestry Commission website)