Urban LL Spain

Description

The Spanish Urban Living Lab consists of an extended distribution with 13 different soil sites (and potential LHs) in the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve and the NetZero city of Vitoria. The Living Lab works to restore soil health while promoting resilient and sustainable development, along with regional collaboration in the Basque Country.

Challenges

The main challenges faced by the LL include recovering landscape ecological functions and increasing soil biodiversity; addressing soil sealing and re-using previously paved soil; water saturation, drainage and contamination issues; and decontamination of heavy metals and organic contaminants. All of which go hand in hand with the challenge of solving these problems while raising awareness and introducing community education to achieve lasting impact.

Possible Solutions

The Living Lab aims at implementing different approaches to tackle the challenges of the different sites. Some current solutions are bioremediation, agroecology, nature-based solutions for soil decontamination, de-sealing, de-paving. Other solutions are related to water and biofiltration structures, delaying surface water run-off, reducing in turn the amount of erosion and pollutants in soil. All the while promoting soil literacy aligned with interventions.

“We have pollutants coming from industrial shipyards or industry before the 90s, 80s, in the former century. And right now we have this kind of challenges everywhere. The idea is just to improve it, knowing that the different soils have different stories, and that we need just to exchange best practices and solutions to make this happen. We need to have an open innovation between different stakeholders- universities, academia, municipalities, public and private, but also the soil needs to be considered as the user because we are talking about humans and we are talking about environment in both sides.”

Itziar Vidorreta, ESKILARA, LL lead Spain