Building Nature-Positive Cities Housing, Resilience, and Sustainable Urban Futures

This event will present the OECD Policy Paper “Advancing Nature-Positive Cities (NPCs): Overcoming implementation challenges and unlocking solutions”. Nature-positive approaches and urban green infrastructure have emerged as key strategies in urban policy, offering urban-scale synergies across policy objectives. As urbanisation accelerates, built-up areas expanded faster than population growth in 80% of OECD Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) between 2000 and 2020, contributing declining urban green space, increased heat and flood risks, biodiversity loss and reduced resource availability. Notably, tree cover declined by 72% in large OECD cities between 1992 and 2018, while 44% of the GDP (USD 31 trillion) is at risk of disruption from biodiversity and broader nature loss. Initiated last year, OECD’s research on NPCs has identified key implementation challenges and policy pathways to overcome such challenges.
The session will share the paper’s key findings and showcase innovative international practices, illustrating how nature-based solutions are being integrated into urban planning, infrastructure, housing and climate resilience strategies across diverse contexts. The discussion will focus on practical implementation issues, including managing trade-offs related to land use and social equity, developing technical standards and guidelines, mobilising sustainable financing, and strengthening measurement and monitoring frameworks. For example, if poorly designed, nature-positive measures such as green roofs can increase upfront construction costs, EUR 140–250 per square metre in Italy compared to EUR 80–100 for traditional roofs, potentially exacerbating housing affordability pressures, despite their long-term benefits.
Aligned with the WUF 13 theme “Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities,” the session will highlight how housing development, when well planned and managed, can become a powerful opportunity to advance nature-positive and resilient cities. Bringing together representatives from international organisations, national governments, cities and metropolitan authorities, as well as experts and practitioners, the event provides a timely opportunity to deepen the understanding of complexity of nature-positive approaches and to discuss the possible innovative solutions.