Integrated Assessment of Urban Greening, Air Quality, and Health in the Paris Region: Insights from the PEPR VDBI Paris-RÉUSS-I projects inteGREEN and URBHEALTH

Altogether, urbanization, climate change, and air pollution challenge human health, equity, and ecosystem integrity in cities. As a consequence, the French Programme and Priority Research Equipment for Sustainable Cities and Innovative Buildings (PEPR VDBI) supports interdisciplinary research to generate scientific evidence that bolsters resilient urban planning and public health strategies. Within this programme, the Paris RÉUSS-I initiative merges two complementary research initiatives : inteGREEN and URBHEALTH, to investigate how vegetation-based solutions and pollutant exposures shape environmental and health outcomes in the Paris region. 

Urban greening strategies entail a rigorous spatial and functional framework to optimize ecosystem services. inteGREEN investigates the placement, morphology, and typology of urban green infrastructures to enhance their multi-dimensional benefits. At the heart of our approach is the optimization of the soil-water-plant continuum, ensuring vegetation resilience and sustained ecological performance. Moreover, the research addresses the social dimension by evaluating accessibility and equitable use across diverse urban populations.  By combining field experiments, environmental monitoring, social surveys, and numerical modeling, this component develops decision-relevant indicators and tools for urban greening strategies that maximize positive outcomes while limiting downsides such as water demand, maintenance constraints, and biogenic emissions from vegetation.

On the other hand, URBHEALTH investigates the health impacts of spatial heterogeneities in urban air pollution by focusing on regulated and emerging pollutants, such as ultrafine particles or black carbon, using the oxidative potential, a key indicator of their intrinsic toxicity. Harnessing high-resolution atmospheric modeling, multi-environment exposure estimation, epidemiological data, and socio-economic analysis, URBHEALTH identifies vulnerable populations and urban hotspots of elevated risk. Our scenario analyses will integrate cost–benefit frameworks to assess public-health-oriented mitigation pathways taking into account environmental justice. 

Paris REUSS-I not only advances fundamental research of urban ecosystems and health interactions but also aims at providing actionable insights for policymakers and planners seeking to implement sustainable transformations in cities. At the core of the projects resides interactions with a great variety of stakeholders. Aligning with the session’s interdisciplinary fields of study, our work exposes the ongoing thematic research as well as the process of co-construction and knowledge exchange, thus highlighting the good practices and challenges that we identified so far.