Urban green makes an essential contribution to the adaptation of urban spaces to climate change. It can mitigate extremes in both heavy rainfall and heat by retaining rainwater and cooling the environment through evaporation at high temperatures. In municipal planning processes, urban greeningshould therefore ideally be explicitly taken into account at an early stage, along with other climate adaptation measures. For this purpose, it is worthwhile to highlight the advantages of urban greenin decision-making processes as a counterweight to the production and maintenance costs as well as alternative forms of use. In practice, however, the precise identification and evaluation of benefits from urban green can be challenging.
This is where the Bremen Urban Green Valuation Tool, developed as part of the BREsilient project, comes in. The online tool is based on the ecosystem services concept and quantifies the effects resulting from a change in urban green provision for a range of regulating and cultural ecosystem services. Users can calculate scenarios for all districts of Bremen by increasing or decreasing the existing provision of green spaces, green roofs and street trees using sliders. The tool then calculates how, for example, rainwater retention or temperature regulation capacity changes and evaluates this change in ecosystem service provision in monetary terms. 

This fact sheet provides an overview of the user interface and functionality of the Bremen Urban Green Valuation Tool and discusses its application potential in the planning context. While the tool cannot replace area-specific detailed planning, it shows its strengths in informal planning processes. The tool can be used to quickly compare different scenarios in order to gain an overview. The detailed outputs of individual scenarios can then be used as a basis for discussion and as an argumentation aid to illustrate the added value of urban green. Contexts of application in Bremen for this are, for example, the model city of sponges or the action concept for urban trees, a key measure of Bremen's climate adaptation strategy.