Urban Nature Platform
Assessing the impacts and benefits of Nature-Based Solutions in urban environments
Assessing the impacts and benefits of Nature-Based Solutions in urban environments
Welcome to the Urban Nature Platform, the operational interface of the HIBOU method: a hybrid, multi-criteria and integrated approach designed to assess the impacts and benefits of nature-based solutions (and their alternatives) in urban environments.
This platform enables local authorities, developers, consultancy firms, experts and project managers to understand how planning and design choices affect major urban challenges. It supports informed decision-making by aiming to maximise the ecosystem services delivered by a project while minimising its environmental impacts.
The ecological transition places the need to bring nature back into cities at the heart of current debates, as its potential makes it possible to address multiple challenges simultaneously: reducing urban heat islands, preserving biodiversity, managing stormwater, and improving quality of life, health and well-being.
Yet today, stakeholders often lack:
HIBOU addresses these needs by assessing six major urban challenges through a coherent and harmonised set of indicators. It makes it possible to turn a qualitative ambition (“more nature in the city”) into robust, quantified and comparable assessments.
The Urban Nature Platform makes these assessments simple, accessible and reproducible. It delivers them in a ready-to-use format for public and private decision-making. The platform represents the first digital implementation of the method, enabling the gradual integration of all calculation engines developed by CSTB and its partners. At this stage, only the calculation engine for the Harmonised Biotope Area Factor (BAFh) is available on the platform.
Get a clear understanding of site-specific challenges before the project: biodiversity potential, stormwater infiltration capacity, urban heat issues, etc.
The method allows you to test different choices:
It calculates the impacts for each challenge and highlights the trade-offs for decision-making.
You can evaluate the pre‑design phase, the selected project, the built version, and then the operational life phase. This approach ensures monitoring of the achievement of objectives—an essential step in an increasingly demanding, multi-criteria environmental regulatory context.
You can evaluate the pre‑design phase, the selected project, the built version, and then the operational life phase. This approach ensures monitoring of the achievement of objectives—an essential step in an increasingly demanding, multi-criteria environmental regulatory context.
The HIBOU method adapts to every stage of development projects.
Whether you want to raise awareness, compare scenarios, or conduct a full analysis,
choose the version that matches your objective.