This Breakthrough Will Turn Your City Green

What if there was a way to transform your city from this to this, replacing concrete with flowers and drains with rain gardens? What if we can make our towns resilient against floods, heat waves and droughts, whilst boosting biodiversity and mental health? Right now, all around the world, people are finding incredible ways to bring nature back into our cities. And we're here in Bristol to do exactly that. We're literally kind of surfing on a wetland right now and I never thought I would say that sentence. Pockets of lush green wetlands have been popping up all over the city. And now there's a plan to create a green corridor along the river's embankment. And we're going to help make this dream a reality. Together with our friend Sam Bendley, we'll explore just how easily we can upgrade our cities and what that means for the future of urban environments all over the world. In this video, we're going to be checking out loads of genius innovations that are bringing nature back to the city piece by piece. We're Planet Wild. Welcome to Mission 43. More than half of the global population live in cities and many of these places have one thing in common. They were built on water. Basically, where you see a city, there used to be a swamp or a wetland. Then we built huge drainage networks to remove the water and paved over the land so we could live there. Sometimes even burying entire rivers underground, like the Bièvre in Paris, the Fleet in London, or the Froome here in Bristol. Predictably, removing all this water has led to some massive problems. Flash flooding. Flash flooding. Flash flooding in parts of London. Urban heat island effect. Dangerous conditions to be outdoors. Turns out, wetlands aren't just incredibly important for wildlife, but they also keep temperature and water levels stable. You know, the kind of thing we humans really need to survive. And this is why all over the world people are bringing wetlands back into our cities. When you start to install wetlands across the city, whether that's a small rain garden, a drain pipe wetland, right the way to a lake in your local park, it's really sort of magical and everyone in the city benefits from wetlands. This is Julia from WWT, the wetland charity. They're kicking off a huge effort to turn Bristol into the UK's first wetland city. By replacing old drainage systems with lush rain gardens, installing micro wetlands and backyards, and anchoring huge wetlands on the river, they're creating little pockets of biodiversity everywhere. In fact, over the next few years, there'll be 200 new projects here in Bristol to bring nature back. Just imagine the impact that this would have. It would completely transform public space across the city, creating habitat, absorbing floodwaters, filtering toxic runoff and cooling the city down. And the transformation has already begun. WWT and their partners are creating a wildlife corridor through the city centre. And this is the next piece of the puzzle. We are currently building and planting a futuristic structure called a floating wetland. We've got one platform which is 100 square metres and another smaller 16 square metre platform specifically designed with these miniature staircases to save baby seagulls that are getting stuck in a corner of the harbour. But we are not doing this alone. Hey Cam. Alright Sam, how's it going? How's it going? This is Sam Bentley, founder and host of one of our favourite YouTube channels. If you've never heard of him, he reports good news stories from around the world and is also making a video about the transformation of Bristol. So we asked him if he could help us with our new floating wetland. This is that and then this becomes there and... Okay, okay, this is how it works. Step one is putting all the pieces together and locking them in place. It's a completely modular structure that can be built to any size and every element is recycled, recyclable or biodegradable. The frame and floats are old drinking water pipes that are wrapped in coconut husk. And instead of soil or mud that would just drift away, we're using buoyant clay pellets as the plant bed. And step two is planting it with more than 20 species of native wetland plants. What have you got? Ah nice, glorious. So above water, we have this layered planting system that creates an oasis for pollinators and a safe haven for nesting birds. But the real magic happens underneath. As these plants grow, their roots go super deep into the water, creating a refuge for marine life, cleaning the water, taking all those pollutants out and also regulating water temperature too. There's potential to install up to 5,000 square meters of these floating wetlands here in Bristol, transforming the concrete embankment into a thriving nature corridor. So the Planet Wild community is completely funding the construction and installation of these two modules, as well as even more platforms in the future to make this dream a reality. You know, with Planet Wild, we do projects all over the world bringing nature back in different remote, far-flung places. But it's just amazing to see that it can come back in the middle of our cities. So in addition to the floating wetlands, we're also helping WWT to develop a miniature wetland in a box that can be attached to any ordinary drain pipe. To show you how it works, we're going to take a break from the harbour and visit a small garden nearby to build a prototype. We should probably get on with it though. Yeah. So this is a very ordinary drain pipe coming from the roof, and so when it rains, the water goes from the gutter all the way down here straight into the drain. But we are going to catch this water and use it to create a wetland in a box. Well, it's actually two boxes. The top box acts as a pond where aquatic plants can thrive as it fills up with rainwater. This eventually overflows into the bottom box, a miniature bog that insects and amphibians can call home. So to make it yourself, you just need to follow these steps. First thing we need to do is make a hole in the bottom. This hole should be covered with a filter, and we used this permeable plant pot. Then add a layer of gravel, a fabric membrane, and a layer of soil. The membrane is there to stop the soil running down the drain. Step two, drill a hole into the side of the top box, allowing the water to flow into the bottom box. Step three, take a deep breath and cut the drain pipe so that the entire structure will be in the perfect position to catch the water. Step four, fill everything with native wetland plants and add a wall of loose bricks. And that's it. We're done. And within hours, you'll start to get insects like dragonflies and damselflies coming back here. Spiders can make their homes in here. Frogs and newts can come and live in here. And it's just incredible the amount of biodiversity that can come back just with this. The UK actually has 4,000 square kilometers of garden space just like this. And now we can actually start to use some of that and give it back to nature. We have to interrupt this Planet Wild video to bring you some breaking good news from cities around the world. First up, we're heading to Seoul, South Korea. For decades, the Jonggichon Stream was completely buried underneath a massive elevated highway. But in the early 2000s, the city actually tore that highway down and restored the natural river. Since then, biodiversity has exploded by over 600% and the corridor is now home to hundreds of species of fish, birds and insects. Now we're heading over to the Netherlands where one company has found a way to turn lifeless concrete buildings into green space. Respire use a moisture-retaining concrete layer to grow moss directly onto walls. Within 12 weeks, it forms a green surface that survives on rainwater alone, filtering air pollution while naturally cooling the building. Next up, we're looking to China where they're creating huge sponge cities. Instead of using great infrastructure like concrete pipes to drain stormwater, they're building sprawling urban wetland parks and permeable pavements that naturally soak up extreme floods like a giant sponge. But the ultimate nature city has to be Singapore. By making greenery a core part of their urban design, they've turned a dense metropolis into a city in nature. And their waterways are now so healthy that families of wild otters are happily swimming right through the middle of the central business district. You can see from these projects there's not just one solution. In a city you have to find little pockets and corners to bring nature back around human infrastructure. And that's exactly what we're doing in Bristol. We're literally kind of surfing on a wetland right now and I never thought I would say that sentence. This will be the permanent home of our new wetland. For centuries, it's been a grey wall. But thanks to the Planet Wild community, it will soon look like this. This piece was installed just two years ago and you can see the difference in the colour of the walls. It's just like full of life. There's families of birds in there. It's full of insects. I've seen loads of fish swimming underneath. Just incredible what can happen in such a short space of time. And of course, this is just the beginning. These plants will start to establish, they'll start to grow and it really will start attracting nature in. We haven't even finished installing the wetland yet and there's this family of swans rocking up and checking it out. It can potentially be their new home. That is just so perfect, so beautiful. Finally, we installed the second platform and again, the effect was instant. So we literally just installed the floating wetland and we've seen a baby seagull who is stuck in the water use the ramp and climb up onto the platform and that's just saved its life. It's just unbelievable to witness. And that is the beauty of this project. Nature is just waiting beneath the concrete and the asphalt. And once you give it a chance, it's immediately making our cities more biodiverse, safer and simply nicer places to live. And because it's such a simple solution, it can easily be copied around the world. So our funding here is not only transforming Bristol but it's also creating a blueprint for future wetland cities everywhere. Thank you so much for making it all the way to the end of the video. I hope you can tell that we put a lot of hard work into the missions and the mission videos but we really couldn't do any of it without our community. Right now, we're more than 27,000 members and we're actually growing really quickly, which is so exciting. Every single month, we go on a mission to bring back endangered species, to clean up our oceans and to restore entire landscapes. So if that sounds good to you, you can join Planet Wild as a backup by following the QR code here or the link in the description. Thanks so much for watching and catch you next time.