WWF URBAN SOLUTIONS FRAMEWORK

WWF URBAN SOLUTIONS FRAMEWORK

WWF, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, was founded in 1961 as a nature preservation organization: it raised money from charitable donations to protect nature and natural areas.

It's work is supported by the Living Planet Index, which includes ecofootprinting as a measure of impact: both of which will feature as tools in future analysis.

Gradually it has expanded its focus to include incrementally deeper causes, and solutions, of nature impact, including resource  conservation and climate change, policy - city development, design, governance and activism.

The One Planet Cities program groups all the WWF cities work including the One Planet Cities Challenge, and Urban Solutions framework.

The Urban Solutions framework, laid out in the Urban Solutions Handbook, of which I wrote and designed the latest edition, has evolved as a framework for guiding sustainable action at the city scale.

As the Handbook makes clear, the framework is intended to make use of the city as a lever of change: where, not only can large changes happen comparatively fast, they can happen in synergy with other changes.

The framework is 13 principles covering the main themes of sustainability, and action for sustainability, that a city touches on.

You can group these in the following way:

INPUT & ENVIRONMENT
Air
Water
Ecosystems & Biodiversity

USAGE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Housing & Buildings
Mobility & Accessibility
Consumption
Energy

WASTE & POLLUTION
Waste & Sinks
Climate Change Mitigation
Climate Change Adaptation
Governance & Citizenship

and it adds a special category drawn from the emerging science of ecosystems, relevant also to city governance:

Resilience

The diagram below indicates the Urban Solutions framework principles - and links them to the UN Sustainable Development Goals framework (another framework for the library, to come).

WWF Urban Solutions framework, linked to UN Sustainable Development Goals.
WWF Urban Solutions framework, linked to UN Sustainable Development Goals.