After a landslide in 2017 killed 1,141 people and left more than 3,000 homeless in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown, the city’s recovery plan had included training residents to plant 21,000 native trees, to reduce the risk of future disasters on bare hillsides.

Amid erratic and unusually heavy rains, as well as urban expansion, the city’s mayor had ran a “Freetown the Treetown” campaign, to increase green cover by 50 per cent before the end of 2022. Locals were told to help track tree growth via a smartphone app.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, the Seoul city government, also worked with residents to restore a river that had been covered by a highway overpass. The nature revival project for the Cheonggyecheon Stream, carried out since the early 2000s, has lowered traffic, flooding and temperatures, as well as stimulated nearly $2 billion in urban redevelopment, while attracting 64,000 visitors a day.

Examples like these suggest that cities should invest more in expanding green spaces and nurturing natural systems that provide water, food and clean air — not just to keep residents healthy and tackle climate-change risks, but to boost their economies, said researchers in a report released by the BiodiverCities by 2030 initiative on Monday.

Despite the benefits of green urban improvements, little money is currently spent on these initiatives, they said. The BiodiverCities by 2030 initiative is led by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in Bogota, and the Colombian government.

According to the report, cities had invested no more than 0.3 percent of their infrastructure spending, or only about $28 billion on “nature-based solutions”, usually defined as actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems, in 2021. The researchers called for more investments in this aspect.

Read the full article about why cities should invest in nature from Thomson Reuters Foundation at Eco-Business.