Research on Tap: Imagining New Futures for Urban Biodiversity

Urban areas are at the center of converging climate crises: intensifying weather events, accelerating biodiversity loss, and persistent social inequities. Growing public and policy attention to urban greening creates new opportunities for conservation as well as concerns about green gentrification and displacement. There is an urgent need for evidence-based, equitable approaches to urban greening. At the same time, new methodological tools are making cross-disciplinary analysis more feasible than ever. This moment presents a critical opportunity to align research, policy, and practice, and to answer vital questions. What does “nature” mean in a city, and who gets to access it? How can urban nature be remade in a changing climate? How will the policies and actions of today create the urban nature of the future? 

This Research on Tap will address these questions by bringing together researchers working across terrestrial, coastal, and human systems to explore the intersection of ecological systems and social life in cities. It will examine how policy choices and development patterns shape both environmental outcomes and human well-being over time, and consider the material dimensions of urban nature alongside the social and symbolic meanings that influence how communities experience and value these spaces. By engaging faculty from several BU schools and research centers, this event will foster dialogue across disciplines and model the kind of convergent research needed to expand the scope of urban research at BU and address complex urban challenges.