The Cities and Biodiversity Outlook: 10 main messages

1. It is for urban areas to remedy their own negative effects on the natural environment through development and implementation of adequate solutions.
2. With proper planning and management, cities can retain substantial components of native biodiversity.
3. Quantifying the value of ecosystems and/ or attaching qualitative values enables mainstreaming of ecological factors into city management.
4. Proper planning and resources can result in mutual benefits for human and environmental healthiness.
5. Urban green spaces can contribute to climate-change mitigation.
6. Existing food systems and associated ecosystems can be maintained if their degree of biodiversity is increased, improving global food security in the process.
7. Urban and environmental planning provides opportunities and formal legal mechanisms for biodiversity conservation through design guidelines, building codes, zoning schemes, spatial plans and strategic choices, all coupled with effective enforcement.
8. Cities have an essential role to play in environmental governance focusing on both the urban landscape and the remote ecosystems that are affected by urbanisation.
9. Cities test our capacity to live together and to create environments that are socially just, ecologically sustainable, economically productive, politically participatory and culturally vibrant.
10. Fostering creativity, innovation and learning is essential if the global challenge of preserving biodiversity in the face of unprecedented urbanization is to be met.

Source: Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2012