Setting the Standard for Green Infrastructure: The Need for, and Features of, a Benchmark in England

ABSTRACT

Green infrastructure is an essential component of health and sustainable places. The quality of green infrastructure often represents a missed opportunity to achieve this. This paper presents a review examining how built environment assessment systems evaluate the quality of green infrastructure. This was used to develop proposals for a new benchmark, which were examined by experts in terms of the demand, scope and operation. The findings suggest that current systems are not providing a robust assessment of green infrastructure and that a benchmark for green infrastructure would overcome some of the challenges associated with its planning, design and delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature-based solutions
• ecosystem services
• strategic planning
• urban ecology

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the stakeholders and participants who informed this research, the project partners who supported the work and provided time and venues for the workshops, and anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council under grant (NE/N016871/1).