Amazon Funds Urban Greening Program to Increase Climate-Resilience of German Cities

Amazon today announced a €3.75 million commitment to The Nature Conservancy in an effort to reduce climate change risks and increase species biodiversity in three German cities. The initial project is in Berlin’s Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. Learnings will be applied in two other German locations, and then shared across other European cities. With this, Amazon is recognizing the urgency of the climate crisis and its impacts on urban communities. The announcement follows The Climate Pledge, the company’s commitment to be net zero carbon by 2040.

Amazon’s commitment will fund The Nature Conservancy’s Urban Greening program, which uses nature-based solutions to help cities become more climate-change resilient. The program will collaborate with city officials and local community organizations to create and implement plans for:

• reducing flood risk by improving rainwater retention through tree planting, revitalizing urban wetlands, and adapting existing green spaces,
• reducing extreme heat and pollution by leveraging unused public spaces to plant trees and improving urban water bodies, and
• increasing urban biodiversity by introducing pollinator-friendly species, climate resilient plants, and urban grasslands.

The program starts in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of Berlin and uses a science-based, municipality-wide, and stakeholder-based approach to urban greening to ensure that projects are complementing existing local efforts. Two additional German cities will be chosen, in which the initial learnings from Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf will be applied. The goal is to share a guide to urban greening with municipalities across Europe by the end of the five-year project.

In recent years, Berlin has experienced extreme weather, and people have been affected by intense heat waves and floods. For example, storm “Axel” in May 2019 released 70 liters of rainfall per square meter, leading to severe flooding. “We believe that cities play an important role to lead on climate action at the local level in the coming decades, in support of Germany’s strong national commitment of climate neutrality by 2050,” said Dr. Kerstin Pfliegner, Germany Director of The Nature Conservancy.

“The people of Berlin are experiencing climate change first-hand – with urban floods and extreme heat events in the past years,” said Dr. Ulrich Heink, Director of the Department of Nature Conservation, Berlin-Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. “The nature-based climate solutions in this urban greening program will help to reduce these impacts while at the same time increase biodiversity and citizen well-being.” Dr. Kerstin Pfliegner added: “Our research shows that nature can offer cost-effective options for resilience in this changing environment.”