New initiatives to map green space and fund green infrastructure investment launched

Green infrastructure does not receive anything like the investment or management that goes into grey infrastructure. With this is mind, CABE has launched its Grey to Green campaign to begin a debate about whether this is smart, given the dangers of climate change and the opportunities to improve public health.

Parks and gardens, waterways, allotments, tree-lined streets and green roofs can provide a network of green resources. This green infrastructure could be a powerful tool to help towns and cities to adapt to climate change and improve public health.

Yet decades of under-investment in green space services mean there is an urgent need for more people, with the right skills, to manage this living landscape, and turn green features and spaces into a functioning network.

CABE’s Grey to Green campaign is calling for a shift in funding and skills from grey to green infrastructure. From investment in projects like road building and heavy engineering, to investment in networks of green spaces to make towns and cities healthier and more beautiful. There is a major gap in the national information about England’s urban green spaces: nobody knows how many there are, where they are, who owns them or what they are like.

This makes it difficult to co-ordinate provision, respond to changing social needs or plan for a changing climate.

A single, shared, information resource – a kind of atlas – would help piece together the different elements of the nation’s green infrastructure – parks, gardens, allotments, trees, green roofs, cemeteries, woodlands, commons, grasslands, moors and wetlands.

CABE also hopes the close the green information gap. Mapping the nation's green spaces is a position paper written for policymakers. It says the new resource could be part of a wider information revolution that makes the most of our nation’s green assets.

Why we must map green infrastructure is a single page letter of endorsement from 15 organisations including CABE, English Heritage, Natural England, Landscape Institute, Keep Britain Tidy and many others.