Fertile Soils: Strengthening Rural-Urban Connections Through Landscape Services

Fertile Soils addresses environmental, social, and governance challenges in rural-urban regions, exacerbated by climate change, urbanisation, and declining biodiversity. The project focuses on operationalising landscape services—ecosystem services consumed and produced within a region—as a sustainable solution to improve environmental quality and revitalise rural-urban interactions.

Key activities include creating spatially explicit inventories of landscape service needs and provisions, identifying synergies and trade-offs, and developing governance frameworks and valuation schemes. The project works across five Dutch regions, tailoring solutions to their unique biophysical and cultural contexts.

Fertile Soils aims to clarify roles and responsibilities for implementing landscape services, equipping authorities and planners with tools to optimise service provision and governance. Farmers and landowners will benefit from valuation schemes offering reliable income sources, supporting transitions to sustainable land use. Stakeholders will gain insights into landscape services’ potential to foster regional identity and social cohesion.

By combining scientific insights with co-creation, Fertile Soils will deliver actionable governance pathways, spatial designs, and educational resources, ensuring long-term collaboration and broad prosperity. This approach strengthens rural-urban connections and promotes sustainable, coherent regions for future generations.

• Ted Veldkamp
• Jasper de Vries
• Mans Schepers

This project aims to address the growing challenges cities face due to urban population growth and climate change, focusing on the integration of energy and water systems for enhanced urban resilience. As traditional siloed approaches to infrastructure planning often ignore the interdependencies between water and energy, the project seeks to develop a holistic decision-support framework to better align these systems. The research will focus on the urban water-energy nexus, incorporating green infrastructure (GI) like green roofs, and conventional water systems, alongside energy efficiency measures.

The project is structured into three main parts: 
1. Developing an integrated model of urban water and energy flows (PhD project).
2. Creating a decision-support framework for infrastructure planning, using spatial analysis tools (PhD project).
3. Applying the framework to case studies in Montréal to create an open-access tool for municipal planners (Master's project).

The goal is to help cities like Montréal better leverage synergies between energy and water systems, enabling more resilient, cost-effective, and sustainable urban development. The research will also support the decarbonisation of urban infrastructures while improving livability and climate resilience.

• Françoise Bichai
• Michaël Kummert

The research project aims to adapt and test SSANTO (spatial suitability analysis tool) for strategic planning of green infrastructure in cold climates. The tool will support urban planning by incorporating new decision-making criteria such as water source protection, biodiversity, social equity, and regulatory constraints. Additionally, urban trees and green spaces will be integrated into the tool alongside traditional water management systems. The project is a collaboration between several research institutions and municipal and environmental organisations in Quebec's cities, with a focus on understanding the socio-environmental impacts of green infrastructure in urban settings.

The core novelty of the project lies in its interdisciplinary approach, combining various expertise to create a comprehensive tool for planning green infrastructure.The project introduces a participatory approach, involving local stakeholders in the decision-making process through workshops and consultations. We thus aim to uncover local needs and priorities and fully adapt SSANTO to reflect those. We will facilitate the integration of diverse stakeholders in urban planning processes, promoting more inclusive, transparent decision-making. With this approach we aim to improve urban water management, enhance public health, and contribute to socio-ecological resilience. 

• Françoise Bichai
• Sophie van Neste
• Marie Dugué
• Danielle Dagenais

Hybridising Urban Water Systems for Sustainability and Resilience

We focus on hybridising urban water systems (UWSs) to enhance sustainability and resilience against challenges like climate change, urbanisation, and infrastructure pressures. While traditional centralised systems dominate, integrating decentralised systems into hybrid models can diversify water sources, recover nutrients, reduce emissions, and improve resilience to extreme weather events.

Our research centres on Quebec and Ontario, where we use statistical analyses to identify factors supporting efficient UWSs. We involve stakeholders through a participatory framework and assess the socio-environmental impacts of hybrid wastewater scenarios. A spatial decision-support tool will guide sustainable planning, with a case study in Saint-Eustache demonstrating the feasibility of hybrid systems.

By combining engineering, economics, and water management expertise, we aim to provide municipalities with actionable tools and frameworks, fostering policy change and driving the transition to more resilient UWSs.

• Françoise Bichai
• Dominique Claveau-Mallet
• Roy Brouwer
• Jie He