Italy-UK Partnership

FROM THE CHAMBERS | 23 developing cutting-edge solutions in order to improve Great Manchester natural environment by promoting the city’s ability to adapt to the increasingly extreme impacts of climate change. Through nature’s solutions, like rain gardens and green roofs, the project is meant to tackle climate change problems, such as flooding events, poor air quality and threats to biodiversity. The plan expects partners to identify suitable locations in the area where the projects could take place and then, through financing mechanisms and building investor confidence, the IGNITION project will ensure that the initial smaller schemes will then become attractive to private investors. “We will be working with our partners to increase our city-region’s urban green infrastructure by 10%, leading the way in finding financing and delivery solutions that will play a vital role globally in ensuring our cities are adapted to climate change. The Living Lab on the Salford campus will be an amazing visual and technical demonstration of the measures needed by city-regions like Greater Manchester to adapt to the increasing impacts of climate change and more extreme weather”, Mayor Burnham said when commenting the project at the University of Salford. NATURAL COURSE’S NEW PROJECTS Natural Course, a project aimed at finding water management solutions by bringing together organisations and entities, such as the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the Rivers Trust, announced in June that they will support two out of the four projects that were selected by Triodos Bank UK with the purpose of protecting valuable habitats. The first project has the objective of restoring peatland in the Pennines area as a measure against environmental problems, as peatland stores more carbon than any other vegetation in the world. The area suffered greatly from the coal-fired industry and the evolving climate change problem, and its restoration requires a greater investment to be carried out. “As we continue to develop innovative financing models for natural environment projects this is really exciting news. We look forward to building our links and engagement with Moors for the Future [the organisation active on the Pennine’s conservation] on this rapidly evolving and transformative agenda”, Krista Patrick, Natural Capital Coordinator, Greater Manchester Environment Team, said during an interview. The second project is the engineering of Natural Flood Management in the Wyre Catchment, Lancashire, by Natural Course’s partners the Rivers Trust. By building leaky dams, bogs and the rewetting of peat on the River Wyre, flood risks should reduce whilst new habitats for the fauna and flora should rise. Consequently, the project will tackle the environment problem through the storage of greenhouse gases in the newly created wetlands and peatlands. “We believe that by implementing natural flood risk management features at scale, we could see significant financial returns from a better river environment. We expect this pilot to lead to future natural capital investment and build a credible case for green investment to restore our river landscapes”, commented Mark Lloyd, CEO from The Rivers Trust, to the Government. ·