Urban green infrastructure includes networks of trees, green streets, streams, wetlands, and other greenspaces that buffer or augment community resilience in the face of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and other impacts from climate change. Building and strengthening these networks is fundamental to all of UGI’s work. 

Urban Greenspaces Institute creates and nurtures regional collaboratives that improve conservation outcomes for imperiled habitats, better integrate nature into cities, and address inequities in conservation investments and environmental benefits. These collaboratives engage a broad range of agencies, businesses, community organizations, and the general public.

Learn more about our Conservation Collaborative projects >

In recent years, the Urban Greenspaces Institute has pursued initiatives to diversify the conservation community. We work to build and strengthen partnerships with BIPOC-led organizations, and we believe these active conservation partnerships offer fertile opportunities for two-way learning and UGI is a stronger organization as a result.

Read more about UGI's effort in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion >

Urban Greenspaces Institute works on the frontlines to advance and refine local and regional policies and investment in green infrastructure to address climate change, environmental justice, human health and livability, as well as watershed and habitat protection.  We do this work through development and delivery of policy perspectives, advocating in public processes, and participation on advisory bodies. 

Read more about our work about Policy and Advocacy >

We provide technical assistance, technical and funding capacity support, and other services to help communities build their own capacity to improve conservation outcomes.

Learn more about projects we sponsor >

Through policy development and advocacy efforts by the Urban Greenspaces Institute, we seek to shift the focus away from merely mitigating environmental harms and towards net ecological lift, to remedy existing constraints or limitations on green infrastructure networks. This shift asks communities to consider historical deficiencies and how we can address them going forward with new development as design challenges. 

The Urban Greenspaces Institute fosters conservation collaboration, advocates for policy innovation and reform, and hosts projects and sponsorships that advance urban nature conservation, access to nature, and climate change adaptation within the Portland metropolitan region. We accomplish this work by: 
 

• Building and sustaining conservation collaboratives, which enable public and private sector partners to leverage limited resources to address regional issues of high conservation need.
• Developing policy analyses and proposals to support advocacy and policy reform that improve conservation outcomes for priority habitats and species, remedy inequitable access to nature, and enhance community resiliency and adaptation in the face of climate change.
• Fostering projects and sponsorships that create innovative urban conservation solutions to challenges or issues faced by local communities.