Nature-based solutions as financially viable opportunities
Nature not only provides unbelievable benefits for our physical and mental health, but also offers cheap and aesthetic solutions to develop our cities and reshape our landscapes, enabling the long-desired paradigm shift across all areas of economic life. If we monetise the ecosystem services nature provides, they are, no doubt, far the best infrastructure. Yet, […]
Sustainability in Action: Local Voices Driving the Future of Biosphere Reserves
Biosphere reserves (BRs) are internationally recognized “learning places for sustainable development,” where conservation and human activity coexist in a balanced way. They serve as living laboratories for testing and refining approaches that reconcile biodiversity protection with sustainable use. By preserving vital ecosystems, fostering community engagement, and providing platforms for dialogue, biosphere reserves deliver local solutions […]
Together With Citizens for Climate Resilience: Nature-Based Solutions and Participative Governance in CONE
In cities, climate change creates key challenges but for which our old friends, nature-based solutions offer an effective, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing solution. However, these solutions require coordination between parts of the so-called quadruple helix (i.e., public authorities, businesses, academia and citizens). In the Interreg Central Europe project CONE (Cities of nature: nature-based-solutions in urban […]
Going Real: How We Help Biosphere Reserves in the Hungary-Slovakia Border Region
In most of our articles, we focus on projects that are European in scale, or at the very least, concentrate on multiple European countries. But as we often emphasise, the whole point of such projects is to foster the proliferation of innovative, green solutions on a national or local level: to ensure that local or […]
UPSURGE: Towards a More Digital NBS
’City-centered approach to catalyze nature-based solutions through the EU Regenerative Urban Lighthouse for pollution alleviation and regenerative development’, or UPSURGE for its friends, is a Horizon 2020 project where BURST is a partner organisation. We thought it is time we checked in on this project, so we asked BURST project manager Mihály Kondacs about the […]
Synergies for Decarbonisation: How Public and Private Environmental Efforts Can Complement Each Other?
Achieving carbon neutrality is not only a key challenge for humanity, but a target for the EU to be achieved by 2050. Our project, Aligning public and CoRpOrate Sustainability goalS, or ACROSS, sets out to support that, by aligning public and corporate sustainability efforts, more precisely, by leveraging corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes in order […]
How Can We Make Construction Greener in Central Europe?
This month, we will focus on an Interreg Central Europe we work on, ReBuilt. The construction sector is one of the main contributors to climate change and environmental damage, with its immense use of resources, waste and greenhouse gas emissions. ‘More than 50% of all extracted materials, 50% of water and a thirds of energy […]
How to Make Biodiversity Governance More Participatory?
This month, we wanted to highlight another Interreg Europe we are part of, this time led by the Province of Potenza in Italy: CiBioGo, or Citizen Participation in Biodiversity Governance. Biodiversity governance, such as safeguarding protected natural areas or strengthening ecosystems and biodiversity, is key for reaching the EU’s “30×30” target as set out in […]
NBS4LOCAL #1
An Interreg Europe Project to Mainstream Nature-Based Solutions NBS4LOCAL, an Interreg Europe project that BURST is part of, has reached a major milestone recently. This is a great opportunity to summarise what our project has achieved so far and what is next in our work. This project, led by the Hungarian Ministry of Public Administration […]
How an EU-funded project is transforming housing in Budapest?
The cost of housing is increasingly becoming a significant issue in all major European cities. Budapest, where BURST is based, however, is especially hard hit by the housing crisis, seeing one of the largest increases in housing prices in Europe. Meanwhile, as the yearly housing report of Habitat for Humanity Hungary highlights, there are no […]
