10 February – 13 February 2025
The Winter School aims to illustrate the potential of NBS within the framework of the urban WEFE (Water Energy Food and Ecosystem) nexus. Various experts will contribute to sharing their knowledge on climate change mitigation, retention capacity, urban biodiversity, outflow quality and reuse, monitoring and modeling aspects, practical applications, and social acceptance and active participation.
Winter School
Professors:
- Francesco Viola, full professor, DICAAR, Università degli Studi di Cagliari
- Ilaria Gnecco, associate professor, Università degli Studi di Genova
- Anna Palla, associate professor, Università degli Studi di Genova
- Fulvio Boano, associate professor, Politecnico di Torino
- Dario Pumo, assistant professor, Università degli Studi di Palermo
- Elena Cristiano, researcher, DICAAR, Università degli Studi di Cagliari
- Aurora Gullotta, researcher, Università degli Studi di Catania
- Chiara Catalano, researcher, Italian National Research Council
Hours: 25 hours
Dates: From Monday 10 February 2025 (10:00) to Thursday 13 February 2025 (13:30)
Abstract
(This course will be only in English)
Nature-based solutions (NBS), defined by the European Commission as “cost-effective solutions inspired and supported by nature, which provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience” have been widely investigated over the last decades and locally adapted to support sustainable development. In urban areas, NBS have been used to address most of the societal challenges related to climate change and urbanization: different NBS have been implemented (e.g., permeable pavements, green roofs, green walls, rain gardens, etc.), with the aim of recreating the natural environment, increasing biodiversity, creating new ecosystems, reducing runoff generation, restoring groundwater infiltration and limiting the urban heat island effects.
In this context, the Winter School aims to illustrate the potential of NBS within the framework of the urban WEFE (Water Energy Food and Ecosystem) nexus. Various experts will contribute to sharing their knowledge on climate change mitigation, retention capacity, urban biodiversity, outflow quality and reuse, monitoring and modeling aspects, practical applications, and social acceptance and active participation.
Duration: 25 hours between Monday 10 February and Thursday 13 February
Extended description
The Winter School, which will be held in English, consists of 25 hours of lectures and includes a field trip. Lectures will be held at the University of Cagliari (Via Marengo 2, 09123, Cagliari), in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture.
The field trip aims to present some real applications of NBS in the urban context of Cagliari. During the trip we will visit the green roof prototypes installed at the University of Cagliari, the Botanical Garden and the Orto dei Cappuccini.
Calendar
The Winter School will be structured as follows:
February 10th, 2025 – (5.5 hours from 10:30 to 13:00 and from 14:30 to 17:30)
Francesco Viola Introduction
Dario Pumo New urban challenges and climate adaptive design
Elena Cristiano Green roofs benefits and limitations in a WEFE nexus context
Aurora Gullotta Hydrological performances of blue-roof systems: the experimental pilots of Catania
February 11th, 2025 – (6 hours from 9:30 to 12:30 and from 14:30 to 17:30)
Dario Pumo From monitoring to performance assessment of a green roof: the experimental site of Palermo
Elena Cristiano The Polder Roof project
Fulvio Boano Urban adaption to climate change: the Green Court site at Torino
Chiara Catalano Possible ways to foster the uptake of knowledge on Nature-based Solutions
Chiara Catalano Green Roofs as a Mainstreamed Nature-Based Solution Tackling the Challenge of Biodiversity Loss
February 12th, 2025 – (3 hours Field Trip + 6 hours from 13:30 to 19:30)
Field Trip
Ilaria Gnecco BRC and DRWH modelling at settlement scale
Anna Palla Long term assessment of green roof hydrologic performance
Ilaria Gnecco The role of green roofs in supporting water quality management
Anna Palla Participatory and collaborative approach in the design of NBS
February 13th, 2025 – (4.5 hours from 9:00 to 13:30)
Fulvio Boano Green walls for greywater recycling
Elena Cristiano Urban scale implementation of green roofs and rainwater harvesting systems
Elena Cristiano Social acceptance and willingness to pay for NBS
Francesco Viola Conclusion & Final Exam
| Lecturer | Title | Module description |
| Dario Pumo | New urban challenges and climate adaptive design | The impacts of climate change and global warming are increasingly evident in Europe and across the globe. According to the most reliable and recent projections, these effects are expected to intensify, leading to more frequent and severe extreme weather events, including heatwaves, droughts, and floods. The interplay between climate change and urbanization has led to significant hydrological alterations, particularly in urban areas where dense populations, infrastructure, and activities heighten exposure and risk. Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) emerge as critical climate adaptation strategies, delivering numerous direct and indirect benefits. This introductory lecture will offer a general overview of key topics (e.g., climate change impacts, risk management, hydrological changes, etc.) to enhance understanding of the benefits provided by NBSs. It will also explore concepts like resilience, hydraulic and hydrological invariance, sustainable stormwater management, which are fundamental to climate-adaptive urban design. |
| Elena Cristiano | Green roofs benefits and limitations in a WEFE nexus context | Green roofs are strategic tools that can play a significant role in the creation of sustainable and resilient cities. This lecture will offer a review of benefits and limitations of green roofs, with a focus on multilayer ones, within a Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem nexus context. This approach enables the potential impact of green roofs on the different sectors to be highlighted, investigating also the interactions and interconnections among the fields. Moreover, the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem nexus approach highlights how the installation of traditional and multilayer green roofs in urban areas contributes to the Development Goals defined by the 2030 Sustainable Agenda. |
| Aurora Gullotta | Hydrological performances of blue-roof systems: the experimental pilots of Catania | Blue-roof systems are conceived with the objective of allowing on-site detention and delayed release of the rainwater intercepted by the roof catchments. Although, the idea of detaining rainwater on the roof is far from the traditional design approach (typically aiming at draining roofs as fast as possible), the benefit of installing blue roofs is being increasingly demonstrated worldwide. This lecture aims to provide a general overview of the potential for stormwater control of blue-roofs systems. Moreover, results of field campaigns carried out on three different full-scale pilots of blue-roof installed in Catania are presented. |
| Dario Pumo | From monitoring to performance assessment of a green roof: the experimental site of Palermo | The systematic monitoring of green roofs, coupled with the definition of appropriate performance indicators and the development of reliable predictive models, is essential for quantifying their effectiveness in addressing the new and emerging urban challenges. Evaluating the response of green roofs to past, present, and future climate scenarios is critical to guiding their implementation, facilitating integration into urban development strategies, and supporting future incentivization policies. This lecture will show the case study of Palermo, where an advanced blue-green roof prototype was installed in 2019. It will provide an overview of the complex sensor network implemented at the experimental site, and detail the monitoring results, highlighting the hydrological and thermal performance observed during the monitoring period. |
| Elena Cristiano | The Polder Roof project | As part of the Polder Roof field lab project, prototypes of multilayer blue-green roof developed by the Dutch company Metropolder were installed in four Italian cities: Cagliari, Palermo, Perugia, and Viterbo. The four prototypes and the experimental set up are described and the potential benefits of this innovative solution are discussed. This lecture illustrates a comparison of the 4prototypes to provide an interesting overview of different structural solutions. The presented work will help understanding how different climates and different structural design lead to different performances. |
| Fulvio Boano | Urban adaption to climate change: the Green Court site at Torino | This lecture will describe the characteristic of the Green Court (GC), an outdoor system that has been realized at Politecnico di Torino. The GC system is a large-scale bioretention system aimed at verify the potential of urban vegetation for adaptation to climate change.located in the inner courtyard of the Laboratory of Hydraulics. Rainwater for the cortyard and the nearby roof is collected in a first tank and is used for irrigation of the vegetated garden. The GC is composed of three separate units in parallel that can be used to investigate different treatments (e.g., irrigation, soil amendment, vegetation type). After infiltration in the garden soil, water is collected through subsurface drain, and samples are analysed to identify differences in water quantity and quality from the three units. |
| Chiara Catalano | Possible ways to foster the uptake of knowledge on Nature-based Solutions | With the introduction of NbS in the EU Research & Innovation (R&I) agenda, embracing other approaches such as green and blue infrastructure, and ecosystem services, the EUpositioned itself as a pioneer and leader in this field since 2015, with the aim to greening the economy and achieving sustainable development while fostering biodiversity and human well-being. Drawing on recent initiatives and Biodiversa-funded projects, the lecture focuses on three pivotal processes that underpin the uptake of NbS knowledge into policy, practice, and decision-making: Establishing a shared understanding of what NbS are (taxonomy and definitions) and how their benefits and co-benefits can be measured (indicators, monitoring); Disseminating NbS knowledge, either by sharing research findings through multiple channels, or by virtual sources of knowledge; Fostering cooperation through the exchange of experiences, stakeholder engagement, and training programs for researchers and practitioners to enhance their skills in the realm of NbS. |
| Chiara Catalano | Green Roofs as a Mainstreamed Nature-Based Solution Tackling the Challenge of Biodiversity Loss | Green roofs (GRs) belong to the third type of NbS, namely, the creation of new ecosystems synthetically defined as surfaces detached from the ground, spontaneously colonised by plants, or intentionally greened. Their strength lies in the multiple benefits (co-benefits) they offer to single buildings and the urban environment as a whole: from the absorption of air pollutants and the reduction of energy consumption in buildings to the provision of biodiversity. The lecture will focus on the latter service, discussing the design principles of the habitat template approach which allows GR to become part of the urban ecological network. In short: conceiving GRs as landscapes instead of flat homogeneous surfaces will improve biodiversity, for example, by varying substrate type and thickness, adding small temporary ponds and foreseeing areas with scattered vegetation. Among others, a way to select plant species and communities for green roofs is to take the phytosociological classification as a template given by the characteristic, diagnostic and recurrent species of natural stands. An accurate preliminary site analysis is essential to select the proper natural template and to replicate the edaphic conditions characterizing it. |
| Ilaria Gnecco | Bioretention cells and domestic rainwater harvesting systems as sustainable stormwater management measures to support urban flood resilience | In the framework of urban flood resilience, the role of sustainable stormwater management measures is illustrated at the scale of urban residential settlements. The hydrologic and hydraulic performance of bioretention cells (BRCs) and domestic rainwater harvesting systems (DRWHs) is examined by means of a modelling framework implemented within the TRIG Eau’s web-GIS based application. Results expressed by means of event-based hydrologic and hydraulic metrics are examined under different levels of imperviousness of the residential settlement, precipitation regimes, catchment configurations as well as different spatial configurations of measures. Furthermore, an analytic hierarchical process (AHP) is employed to select the optimal BRC configurations. |
| Anna Palla | Long term assessment of green roof hydrologic performance | In order to effectively estimate the hydrologic performance of green roofs, continuous simulation approaches are recently used thus allowing to include the climate regime features (precipitation and temperature) impact on the varying soil moisture conditions and the corresponding water holding capacity of the systems. This lecture aims to present and discuss a simple methodological approach to perform continuous simulation including the estimate of the actual evapotranspiration. |
| Ilaria Gnecco | The role of green roofs in supporting water quality management | Green roofs are increasingly used due to their retention and detention capacity while the impact of green roofs in term of water quality is still a debated issue among researchers. This lecture aims to illustrate how the retention, detention, and infiltration processes promote the occurrence of adsorption and dissolution mechanisms throughout the green roof components generally limiting the total pollutant mass delivered on an event basis. Finally, the impact of a green roof in altering storm water quality will be examined based on the observed pollutant loads reported in the literature. |
| Anna Palla | Participatory and collaborative approach in the design of NBS | Planning for resilient cities requires an evidence-based understanding of flood risk and the involvement of stakeholders and local actors. The aim of this lecture is to introduce the top-down/bottom-up participatory and flexible methodology for the co-creation of participatory mapping aimed at the planning and installation of NBS. Results for a case study developed within the URCA!—Urban Resilience to Climate Change: to activate participatory mapping and decision support tool for enhancing sustainable urban drainage—project will be used as a base for sharing visions and expectations concerning urban transitions. |
| Fulvio Boano | Green walls for greywater recycling | Greywater, i.e., the portion of household wastewater that excludes toilet flushes, is a type of wastewater that is particularly interesting for reuse purposes because it is produced in large amounts with relatively low concentration of contaminant. Nature-based solutions have proposed for greywater treatment, but their implementation is often hindered by the lack of space in urban areas. Green walls have been proposed to avoid this limitation due to their low areal footprint, low energy requirement and high ecological/societal benefits. This lecture will present research results on strengths and limitations on the use of green walls for treatment and reuse of greywater. |
| Elena Cristiano | Urban scale implementation of green roofs and rainwater harvesting systems | Rainwater harvesting systems and green roofs are recognized as being among the most effective blue-green mitigation measures. However, the performances of these systems have currently been investigated only at laboratories or very-small local scales. This lecture aims to explore and compare the potential benefit of the extensive installation of green roofs and rainwater harvesting systems over an entire city. |
| Elena Cristiano | Social acceptance and willingness to pay for NBS | Although green roof benefits have been widely recognized, the perception that the community has of these nature-based solutions and the willingness to pay for them play a significant role in the actual feasibility of a large-scale installation. Societal perception and willingness to pay for green roofs are fundamental for urban planners and decision makers, since they represent the community participation in the sustainable development of urban areas. In this lecture, we will explore how citizens perceive green roofs and nbs and how willing they are to pay for the installation and maintenance. |
Contact
Elena Cristiano, winterschool.nbs@gmail.com
Enrollment
To enrol, fill in the following form before January 15th: https://forms.gle/g9MQHDezC8HGqqqC7
The school is free of charge, but participants will have to cover travel and accommodation costs at their own expense. All students, scientists and professionals are asked to upload a CV and a motivation letter when applying. Admissions are reserved for up to 25 participants. Registration deadline: January 15th, 2025. Fill out this form to apply: https://forms.gle/g9MQHDezC8HGqqqC7 The certificate is issued for participants that attend more than 80% of the lectures and successfully pass a written exam.
Bibliography and Web references
Boano, F., Caruso, A., Costamagna, E., Fiore, S., Demichelis, F., Galvão, A., … & Masi, F. (2020). Assessment of the treatment performance of an open-air green wall fed with graywater under winter conditions. ACS ES&T Water, 1(3), 595-602. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsestwater.0c00117
Campisano, A., Gullotta, A., & Modica, C. (2018). Laboratory analysis of the outflow and detention processes from modular tray-based blue roofs. Urban Water Journal, 15(10), 934-942. https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2019.1597377
Campisano, A., Modica, C., & Gullotta, A. (2021). Long-term experiments for the evaluation of the potential for storm water control of modular blue roofs in Mediterranean climate. Urban Water Journal, 18(1), 33-42. https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2020.1850807
Catalano, C. (2024). Green Roofs as a Mainstreamed Nature-Based Solution Tackling the Challenge of Biodiversity Loss. In Beyond the Garden: Sustainable and Inclusive Green Urban Spaces (pp. 117-137). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50567-6_8
Catalano, C. (2024). Green Roofs as a Mainstreamed Nature-Based Solution Tackling the Challenge of Biodiversity Loss. In Beyond the Garden: Sustainable and Inclusive Green Urban Spaces (pp. 117-137). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12938.18888
Catalano, C., Marcenò, C., Laudicina, V. A., & Guarino, R. (2016). Thirty years unmanaged green roofs: Ecological research and design implications. Landscape and Urban Planning, 149, 11-19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.01.003
Catalano, C., Pasta, S., & Guarino, R. (2021). A plant sociological procedure for the ecological design and enhancement of urban green infrastructure. Urban Services to Ecosystems: Green Infrastructure Benefits from the Landscape to the Urban Scale, 31-60. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75929-2_3
Cristiano, E., Annis, A., Apollonio, C., Pumo, D., Urru, S., Viola, F., … & Nardi, F. (2022). Multilayer blue-green roofs as nature-based solutions for water and thermal insulation management. Hydrology Research, 53(9), 1129-1149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2023.110731
Cristiano, E., Deidda, R., & Viola, F. (2021). The role of green roofs in urban Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem nexus: A review. Science of the Total Environment, 756, 143876. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.143876
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Cristiano, E., Farris, S., Deidda, R., & Viola, F. (2021). Comparison of blue-green solutions for urban flood mitigation: A multi-city large-scale analysis. PLoS One, 16(1), e0246429. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246429
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381557118
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