Liverpool wins European climate change funding for four new 'greening schemes'

A series of ‘green’ projects are set to transform parts of Liverpool after the city was named as one of just five locations from 100 hopefuls across Europe to receive funding from a special continent-wide climate grant.

Money from the Sustainable Cities Mobility Challenge - which aims to ‘decarbonise transport, improve local air quality, and build more climate-resilient communities’ - will be used on four new active travel routes in the city.

The greening schemes are scheduled to be delivered this summer around the fringe of the city centre and include a green wall, special paving to enhance local biodiversity and the transformation of an inaccessible path by replicating award-winning landscaping. The four projects are:

• Grafton Street Green Wall – This would be Liverpool’s fourth green wall and will involve installing a series of trellis planters on Grafton Street in the Baltic Triangle area where an upgrade to active travel facilities will also be taking place.
• St Bride’s Church Hedge Planting – Located on Catharine St (adjacent to the soon to be introduced active travel route) this scheme will see the introduction of native hedge and bulb planting which will provide a natural screen for the church grounds from a busy road.
• Sustainable Modal Filter – With the creation of a modal filter at the junction of Kent Street and Upper Pitt Street, an environmentally friendly form of paving will be trialled to improve surface water drainage in an area at risk of flooding and to also enhance local biodiversity.
• Hill Street Greening – Hill Street will shortly be benefiting from an active travel upgrade which will see improvements made to an existing path that is currently inaccessible and uninviting to users. This path runs beside some low-grade amenity space which is proposed to be transformed with native species planting similar to the transformation on Blundell Street, which has resulted in increased pollinator counts of over 800%, which has also recently won an award for landscaping.

Andy Mollon, Director of Transportation and Highways at Liverpool City Council, said: “Liverpool is committed to creating cleaner, greener, and more people-centred transport options, which is why we’re investing millions of pounds to improve active travel networks across the city to achieve exactly that.”

Project-specific grants from the Sustainable Cities Mobility Challenge will also be awarded to Cornellà de Llobregat and Santa Coloma de Gramenet (Spain), Lisbon (Portugal) and Utrecht (Netherlands). The schemes in Liverpool are an extension of the City Council’s URBAN GreenUP programme to change how the city can use green (planted) and blue (water) spaces to adapt to the predicted impacts of climate change.

The city council has worked with the Mersey Forest and the University of Liverpool to test how different types of nature-based solutions can be retrofitted into urban city spaces. The range of projects delivered include three different types of vertical green walls, a pollinator roof and Liverpool’s first urban city rain garden. The £3.5m programme, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 initiative, has also involved floating ecosystem islands in the city centre docks system as well as a mobile ‘pop up’ forest and some innovative pollinator spaces.