In December 2020, Belfast launched the Belfast Resilience Strategy alongside the Belfast Net Zero Carbon Roadmap and the Belfast One Million Trees programme. Together these form the foundations for the city’ s ambitions to achieve carbon neutrality (80% reduction by 2030 and 100% by 2050). The city has also put liveability in its core through the multi-partner strategy ‘A Bolder Vision for Belfast’ which aims to create sustainable and mixed-use neighbourhoods in the city centre through the redevelopment of brownfield sites. Belfast’s vision is to create a people-focused environment with playful streets and spaces for children and families to live and thrive.
The city has been working in aligning play, climate neutrality, tree planting and green infrastructure by developing the award-winning Urban Childhood Report and has been testing these new approaches in the design and implementation of a new city centre multi-functional park and in the Cathedral Gardens. However, the municipality needs to elevate and embed these learning and work across council departments and with city stakeholders in more areas and projects across the city.
Through UP2030, Belfast seeks to create a framework that will be applied in all its regeneration projects that integrates tree planting, green infrastructure, play and co-design with young people. The framework will be tested in the Linen Quarter district, which has been identified of becoming the first sustainable and net zero business district in Northern Ireland. Lessons learned from this pilot will be useful to identify opportunities in other neighbourhoods and upscale the concept of net-zero districts across the city. Furthermore, the municipality aims to address the fragmentation in terms of governance and delivery, embedding this project in the upcoming update of Belfast’s Community Plan ‘The Belfast Agenda’.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This project has received funding from the Horizon Innovation Actions under the grant agreement n° 101096405.