How nature-positive cities are helping to create a more sustainable and resilient world

Building cities in harmony with nature is a universal desire. With the world expected to build the equivalent of New York City every month for the next 40 years, the construction sector needs to conserve resources and build better with less. This means building nature-positive cities – and a regenerative future.

To ensure that urbanization supports biodiversity restoration, the private sector is finding new ways to reduce resource demand through circularity practices and to contribute to nature restoration. For this ecosystem shift to continue, public and private sector organizations both need to align with this vision and partner across the entire construction value chain to help create nature-positive cities.

Businesses have an active role to play in advancing a low-carbon economy. In particular, there is a significant opportunity for the construction sector to make more positive contributions to nature through increasing circularity practices. Construction and demolition waste can be reused as aggregate and in other valuable applications.

Leading companies are already showing that this is possible through a “3 R approach”: reduce, recycle, regenerate.

To reduce the sector’s biodiversity footprint, for example, construction companies can limit their total use of natural resources through well thought-out designs and by reducing packing waste and minimising construction errors. This can mean adopting circular economy practices such as reusing concrete demolition waste and improving building energy efficiency, for example. Some companies are also adopting construction practices that limit the use of water, reusing available water where possible and limiting further groundwater extraction. These efforts are part of the UN Water Mandate, which calls for quality monitoring and wastewater treatment by signatories.

To recycle materials and keep them in the construction loop, companies are currently pioneering solutions and innovations that advance circular construction. This means building better with less and creating new from old. Technology can be used to track the recycling of construction demolition materials into new building solutions, for example. This could encourage the reuse of a significant amount of demolition materials across a broad range of applications.

To regenerate ecosystems and bring more nature into cities, companies can embed the development of nature-positive solutions into their research and development activities and across their portfolios. For example, new types of construction materials that integrate dense and porous concrete can be used to grow artificial reefs, helping to restore fragile marine ecosystems.

There are three feasible early contributions the private sector could make:

Local governments must join the transition by putting in place the necessary enabling policy regimes and supporting infrastructure to expand the adoption and use of recycled materials. Some governments are already stepping up support.

Zurich requires all publicly owned buildings to be made using concrete with 25% recycled materials, for example. ReLondon (a partnership between the London mayoralty and boroughs) is also working to reduce annual consumption of primary raw materials by 20% in new constructions.

To reap the benefits of a circular economy, policies must enable greater collaboration across the value chain by improving demand and supply signalling, and investing in public procurement systems and education to scale the impact. Three contributions public stakeholders can make towards a more nature-positive built environment include:

Additional guidelines for cities leading this transition can be found in the new report Nature Positive: Guidelines for the Transition in Cities by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Oliver Wyman.

By taking key actions such as these, private and public sector organizations can ensure readiness across the whole enabling environment for building nature-positive cities – from creating policy frameworks, to providing financial incentives and building the necessary infrastructure.