A collection of green projects in the city of Liverpool designed to complement new active travel routes have been awarded funding from a European-wide climate grant.
With a bid of four schemes, Liverpool was one of the five cities to be chosen from a list of 100 by the Sustainable Cities Mobility Challenge, which aims to promote projects that deliver the transition toward cleaner, greener, and more people-centred transport.
City councils, municipalities or local authorities in EU member states, the UK and Switzerland were all invited to submit proposals that align with Europe’s climate agenda, including the EU Mission 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030.
Liverpool’s four greening schemes, which are all to be delivered this summer around the fringes of the city centre, are:
- Grafton Street Green Wall – This would be Liverpool’s fourth green wall and will involve installing a series of trellis planters on Grafton Street in the Baltic Triangle area where an upgrade to active travel facilities will also be taking place.
- St Bride’s Church Hedge Planting – Located on Catharine St (adjacent to the soon-to-be-introduced active travel route), this scheme will see the introduction of native hedge and bulb planting to provide a natural screen for the church grounds from a busy road.
- Sustainable Modal Filter – With the creation of a modal filter at the junction of Kent Street and Upper Pitt Street, an environmentally friendly form of paving will be trialled to improve surface water drainage in an area at risk of flooding and to also enhance local biodiversity.
- Hill Street Greening – Hill Street will receive an active travel upgrade with improvements to an existing path that is currently inaccessible and uninviting to users. The path runs beside some low-grade amenity space, which is proposed to be transformed with native species planting similar to the transformation on Blundell Street, which has resulted in increased pollinator counts of more than 800%.
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Director of transportation and highways at Liverpool City Council, Andy Mollon, said: “Liverpool is committed to creating cleaner, greener, and more people-centred transport options, which is why we’re investing millions of pounds to improve active travel networks across the city to achieve exactly that.
“Liverpool prides itself on innovation and we’re also looking at a new ways to deliver greener methods in highways construction, so sustainability and how we encourage biodiversity is rooted in everything we do from the materials in our roads to how people travel on them.”
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The projects are an extension of Liverpool City Council’s URBAN GreenUP programme, which aims to change how the city can use green (planted) and blue (water) spaces to help it better adapt to the future predicted impacts of climate change.
The city council has worked with the Mersey Forest and the University of Liverpool to test how different types of green and blue spaces (nature-based solutions) can be retrofitted into urban city spaces to provide an array of environmental, social and economic benefits.
The £3.5m programme, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 initiative, has involved different types of tree planting, floating ecosystem islands in the city centre docks system and a park lake, as well as a mobile ‘pop up’ forest and some pollinator spaces and verges in the city.
For the Sustainable Cities Mobility Challenge, European climate innovation agency EIT Climate-KIC evaluated entries using criteria based on the potential for positive environmental and social impact, learning and replicability.
In addition to Liverpool, project-specific grants will abe awarded to Cornellà de Llobregat and Santa Coloma de Gramenet in Spain, Lisbon in Portugal and Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Achievements and innovations in environmental, city-focused projects will be celebrated at the third annual CiTTi Awards, which will be held on 26 November 2024 at De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in London. Nominations are open now! Please visit www.cittiawards.co.uk to learn more about this unmissable event for the UK’s transportation sector.
