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Active

Building resilience through urban natural assets

We support local governments in Africa to integrate nature-based solutions into land use planning for increased resilience.

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Building resilience through urban natural assets

Years active:

2013 - 2025

Visit the website

Visit the UNA Embed webpage arrow_outward

Related ICLEI Pathway(s)

Locations

Kisumu, Kenya; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Kampala & Entebbe, Uganda; Nacala & Quelimane, Mozambique; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Lilongwe, Malawi

Funded by

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) through SwedBio at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
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About

Project summary

Since 2014, the UNA project has supported cities and helped shift development narratives by positioning nature as an essential asset and part of urban infrastructure. Over the years, the UNA project supported 11 cities across nine countries in their transition towards a more sustainable development trajectory. Through the UNA project’s five flagship projects – Urban Natural Assets for Africa (UNA Africa: 2014-2016), Urban Natural Assets: Rivers for Life (UNA Rivers: 2017-2020), Urban Natural Assets: Coasts for Life (UNA Coasts: 2018-2019), Urban Natural Assets: Resilience and Restoration for Life (UNA Resilience: 2021-2024) and Urban Natural Assets: Embedding and Sharing for scaled Impact (UNA Embed: 2025) – the project facilitated the integration of NbS into governance, planning and later finance. In doing so, it built urban resilience and generated sufficient agency and momentum to support an ongoing process of transformative change.

This project is funded by Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), through SwedBio at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Project aims

UNA Embed overall objectives are to:

Improve the framework and conditions for increased uptake of nature-based solutions that build resilience for all ten African UNA cities through a transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder learning approach.

Foster an enabling environment for public private partnerships (PPP) in all ten UNA cities to support implementation of nature-based solutions.

Embed the human rights-based approach with the eight UNA cities from the preceding phases.

Scale the learnings from the programme’s urban nature-based resilience approaches, demonstrating their ability to support reduced risks, vulnerabilities and inequalities, and improve sustainable livelihoods over longer timeframes.

Leverage strategic communications to share the successes of the programme to date, building a narrative of impact.

Align related activities and outputs with international policy and legal processes, such as those frameworks provided for by international environmental and human rights law, through outreach and advocacy campaigns and the promotion of strengthened multi-level governance systems.

Project partners

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Building resilience through urban natural assets
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