Blue Green Dream

The adverse effects of intensifying climate extremes (floods, droughts and extreme heat) combined with increasing urbanization call for a new paradigm for maximizing ecosystem services, minimizing environmental footprint and increase the cities’ adaptive capacity to changing climate, demographic and socio-economic conditions. The new paradigm calls for rethinking existing ways of planning, designing, constructing, operating and maintaining urban water systems (blue assets) and urban vegetated areas (green assets), not as separate systems as is the case today, but in combination.

Inter alia the project’s multiple benefits include: increased amenity and urban health, enhanced resilience to drought and flood risk, reduced air pollution, noise and energy requirements, mitigation of extreme heat and urban heat island effects and enhancement of biodiversity and quality of life.

Blue Green Dream is a European initiative funded by Climate-KIC with the core center at Imperial College in London. A Nordic Centre for Blue Green Solutions (BGS) has recently been started at Water and Resources Engineering at KTH. Partner cities include Stockholm, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Tampere and Oslo.

The Nordic Centre for BGS will collaborate with the core team at Imperial College in London to contribute to joint development of agreed BGS tools and to further improve quality of urban life as well as urban system resilience, and to accelerate transformation toward urban sustainability.

The goal of the center is:

1. to stimulate and coordinate research, of the multiple BGS for improving functionality of urban infrastructure, aesthetics and the well-being of urban living;
2. to act as a common platform for further development of BGS that build on the Nordic countries' experience and actively promote their full scale implementation in the Nordic region and worldwide.

Contact person: Cecilia Kalin, ckalin (a) kth.se

Link to project website (to be updated)