Dive Brief:
- San Antonio is piloting an online tool to see how potential land use changes could result in benefits for carbon sequestration, urban cooling and residents’ access to nature.
- The Urban Online web application simplifies the process of accessing a suite of software models created by the Natural Capital Project. This Stanford University-based group helps leaders incorporate the value of nature into decision-making.
- Urban Online aims to allow those with no technical training to take advantage of the models, saving its users “hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that might be spent hiring experts to collect data and run the models,” a press release says.
Dive Insight:
As the impacts of climate change, from frequent heat waves to stronger storms, bear down on U.S. communities, many cities are looking to leverage nature to protect people and infrastructure.
The growing interest in taking advantage of nature to boost climate resilience is reflected in a Regional Plan Association analysis from earlier this year. It found that among dozens of public agencies’ climate adaptation plans, nature-based approaches to reducing flood risk made up the largest number of listed strategies.
The Natural Capital Project, or NatCap, says on its website that it advocates for more stakeholders worldwide to see the world’s ecosystems as “capital assets.” “Relative to other forms of capital, living natural capital is poorly understood and undergoing rapid degradation,” the organization says.
NatCap’s InVEST software models allow leaders to evaluate the tradeoffs associated with different land-use management choices. But the models require significant expertise and training to use, NatCap says. Users must understand how to use geographic information systems and computer modeling, and be able to find and prepare the right datasets to feed into the models.
That’s the barrier being addressed by the Urban Online tool that San Antonio is piloting.
“Now you can get InVEST results without ever having to open the InVEST interface,” Anne Guerry, NatCap’s chief strategy officer, lead scientist and Livable Cities lead, said in a statement. “You can click a box and it can run models for you so you don't have to spend the weeks to months that it takes to gather and prepare the necessary inputs for each model you want to run.”
San Antonio can use the tool to understand which nature investments will have the most significant and equitable returns, NatCap says. For example, the tool’s landing page shows the city’s hottest areas with the lowest income, which are areas NatCap says could be ripe for investments in green infrastructure.
More cities could have access to Urban Online in the coming years, with the organization aiming to start building it for U.S. communities, then at the national level and eventually for global locations.
