Imagine a greener Greater Manchester. A place that works with nature and where rain gardens, street trees, green roofs, walls and spaces are scattered across the urban landscape.

That’s the idea behind IGNITION, the €4.5 million project that is developing investment streams to increase green infrastructure across Greater Manchester by 10% by 2038. Funded by the EU’s Urban Innovation Actions initiative, IGNITION brings together 12 partners from local government, universities, NGOs and business in a ground-breaking project to help finance improvements in our natural environment.

And what of those green spaces? They’re essential to our future existence. They can help to tackle the environmental challenges we face, including flooding, air quality and biodiversity, as well as providing societal benefits for our citizens’ health and wellbeing.

The RHS, Groundwork and City of Trees are working together to ask everyone who lives, works, studies or volunteers in Greater Manchester to share their thoughts with the project by filling in a short survey.  This survey will help project partners understand how our citizens value Greater Manchester’s parks, woodlands and other greenspaces. information will be used to determine how we will invest in improving and increasing our greenspaces, and establish the business case for making these investments. 

The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete and can be found here. Please help us to share this survey around your networks.

Complementing the consultation is a series of 50 citizen engagement workshops, taking place over the next 3 months.  IGNITION partners the RHS, Groundwork and City of Trees will deliver the workshops across Greater Manchester to groups of up to 15 people.  

They will provide an opportunity for participants to build on and explore their current understanding of nature-based solutions and what green infrastructure improvements they would like to see in and around the region. The project aims to involve as many citizens as possible to influence green infrastructure improvements.

If you know of any local community groups who would benefit from a 2-hour workshop, focused around valuing our greenspace, please contact Rosie Naylor.