Partners across the Manchester city-region have signed a multi-million pound European contract for a project which looks to develop innovative ways of financing natural solutions to deliver resilience to increasingly extreme climate hazards.
IGNITION will run for up to the next three years backed by £4 million from the EU’s Urban Innovation Actions initiative, in a significant announcement made a week after the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s second annual Green Summit.
The project, the first of its kind, will see Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), supported by 11 other key partners, including the Environment Agency, come together to develop the new innovative financing and delivery mechanisms that cities and urban areas need to respond to the risks posed by increasingly rapidly changing climate.
Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said: “We are serious about our green ambitions in Greater Manchester – to become carbon neutral by 2038 and one of the world’s leading green city-regions. However, we also need to prepare for the climate change impacts which are now unavoidable and we must do it soon; we can’t keep doing things the old way.
“This project will help us encourage widespread use of innovative, nature-based solutions such as green roofs and walls to cool our city-region down, manage water and reduce flooding, while also reducing our carbon output, and improving our air quality. The funding will also help us to find ways to accelerate and finance their deployment.”
Partners will identify sites within Greater Manchester where natural capital climate adaptation projects can manage urban flood and overheating risks.
These smaller individual schemes will then be brought together into larger investible packages of projects at around the £10 million scale, ensuring they are attractive to private investors. Through the development of financing mechanisms and building investor confidence, the IGNITION project will ensure city-regions like Greater Manchester can deliver adaptations to urban green spaces needed to combat climate change and extreme weather risks over the coming decades.
