Kanazawa, a Generation Restoration role model city, models restoration of traditional Japanese gardens to support biodiversity, improve climate resilience, and preserve culture. Its innovative approach to forest management integrates wood into city spaces in a circular economy approach, and it is a pioneer in conservation with various policies that protect biodiversity.

About the city

Kanazawa has a population of approximately 460,000 residents. Located on the western coast of Japan’s main Honshu Island, Kanazawa is a port city on the Sea of Japan. Kanazawa has a humid, subtropical climate, with cold, snowy winters and hot, humid summers. Founded in 1583 as a “jokamachi” (a city developed around a feudal lord’s castle), Kanazawa is a city of great historical importance, famous for its traditional handicrafts and supporting major textile and information technology industries. Kanazawa encompasses more than 150 kilometers of rivers and irrigation canals amid forests, mountains, and marine ecosystems, and features more than a dozen heritage-listed parks, including the Kenroku-en landscape garden and grounds of Kanazawa Castle.

Local challenges

As a city with high levels of precipitation throughout the year, Kanazawa faces various precipitation-related hazards, including increased winter snowfall and flooding from heavy rain events, particularly within its rivers and canals. With its coastal location, Kanazawa is vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal erosion. At the same time, Kanazawa is facing temperature increases and increased frequency and duration of heatwaves. Furthermore, the city faces significant biodiversity loss, largely driven by rapid urban expansion, while nearby forest ecosystems have suffered from decades of under-management and ecological degradation. Furthermore, encroachment of urban areas into forested land has led to the increased proliferation of wildlife within urban areas, posing threats to human health. At the same time, many green spaces in Kanazawa were lost to development after World War II, and more recently, an aging population and migration to the suburbs further contributed to the abandonment and replacement of private gardens.

How the city leads in restoration

A national pioneer in conservation policy, Kanazawa was the first city in Japan to enact a  landscape conservation ordinance in 1968. It has since successfully enacted several regulations and sectoral environmental plans that protect nature and biodiversity, including ordinances on the conservation of canals, promotion of green city building, and forest development.

Through its Ordinance on Forest Development, Kanazawa has taken specific measures to preserve its forest ecosystems. Guided by forest management policy, the ordinance outlines the responsibilities of different actors in preserving forest ecosystems, including government agencies and forestry businesses, and measures to conserve forests for future generations. Specifically, Kanazawa has implemented programs to preserve degraded aged broadleaf and bamboo forests, using techniques such as wood thinning. Rather than discarding the thinned wood, the city integrates it into its broader Wood Culture City Plan in a resource circulation approach, promoting the use of local timber in public buildings, urban structures, and wood crafts throughout the city.

Kanazawa has enacted numerous initiatives to restore greenery and revitalize traditional cityscapes. These include efforts to rehabilitate the canal network, develop clean transportation services, and promote sustainable tourism. Today, its canals are maintained as vital green-blue infrastructure that supports biodiversity, mitigates urban heat, and contributes to the city’s distinctive landscape. In Kanazawa, youth engagement is central to restoring the city’s canals, gardens and historic landscapes, with initiatives developed alongside the United Nations University and recognized by the United Nations Environment Programme as a model for urban ecosystem revival. Furthermore, Kanazawa’s annual firefly survey engages thousands of residents, including youth, to participate in a citizen-science biodiversity monitoring initiative.

Kanazawa has an extensive program showcasing gardens as important nature-based solutions, in partnership with the United Nations University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, Operating Unit Ishikawa/Kanazawa (UNU-IAS OUIK). Through this program, Kanazawa is restoring traditional Japanese gardens throughout the city, many of which were abandoned, destroyed, or had fallen into disrepair over the years. The restoration of the gardens supports biodiversity and improves climate resilience, while preserving an important aspect of Japanese culture. The project works with garden owners, key stakeholders in the project, who enable research and monitoring of garden status and the development of activities to support garden stewardship. The program also involves the creation of new gardens, by transforming abandoned plots into community gardens and public green spaces.

To maintain the gardens, the program has incorporated innovative co-management models featuring sustainable tourism. This reciprocal model involves tourists in garden clean-up and data collection, who in turn are granted unique experiences by garden owners, including guided tours and tea ceremonies. This eco-tourism model also encouraged some private garden owners to open their gardens to the public, increasing access to green space throughout the city and improving community engagement.  

Gardens in Kanazawa have provided extensive opportunities to advance scientific knowledge for the city, including data collection on local biodiversity, carbon sequestration, heat island effects, and vegetation monitoring. Participatory action research enables residents, youth, and neighborhood associations to co-create green spaces and engage in hands-on ecological monitoring, supporting increased scientific awareness and environmental stewardship among Kanazawa residents. Furthermore, the gardens provide living laboratories for education among local students, and children engage in regular field visits to the gardens, who then gain an increased understanding of the importance of gardens for biodiversity. Moving forward, the program envisions scaling up community gardens and green corridors in underutilized urban spaces, and expanding research and educational programming.

Highlight impact metrics

Social:

  • Many residents engaged annually through outdoor cultural events, firefly surveys, garden activities, and participatory action research
  • Increased youth participation through school-based field activities, biodiversity surveys, and hands-on garden stewardship 

Environmental:

  • restoration and stewardship of multiple private and public heritage-listed Japanese gardens across the city
  • Reversal of garden abandonment trends through restoration, co-management, and the opening of private gardens to the public
  • Gardens have become a catalyst for a wider culture–nature momentum in Kanazawa, strengthening the link between heritage conservation and urban biodiversity
  • Ongoing biodiversity, vegetation, climate, and ecosystem monitoring across gardens, canals, forests, and urban green-blue infrastructure 

Economic:

  • Use of municipal subsidies and incentive schemes to support private garden and urban nature owners in maintaining, managing, and preserving traditional gardens and green spaces
  • Financial support mechanisms to encourage the restoration of abandoned or underused land resulting from depopulation, transforming it into ecological gardens, community gardens, and public green spaces
  • Property tax exemptions or reductions for preserved and well-maintained gardens, recognizing their public value for biodiversity, climate resilience, and cultural heritage
  • Alignment of financial incentives with long-term urban biodiversity, landscape conservation, and climate adaptation policies 

Role Model City

City Map

Ecosystem Types

Forests, Freshwaters, Oceans and coasts and Urban areas

Climate, Biodiversity, and Pollution Risks Addressed

  • Extreme temperatures
  • Sea-level rise
  • Extreme precipitation / flooding
  • Habitat destruction
  • Ecosystem degradation
  • Waste mismanagement

Restoration Techniques Applied

  • Canal restoration
  • Ecological connectivity
  • Parks & green spaces
  • Urban forests
  • Waste management

Beyond restoration

Kanazawa’s sustainability vision embeds nature into city-wide planning frameworks and long-term development strategies. Its 2019 Action Plan for SDG Localization integrates nature-based solutions into sectors such as agriculture, waste management, education, culture, and tourism. Efforts include locally grown food, achieving zero-waste targets, and elevating circular-resource practices to advance the city’s sustainability. Furthermore, as a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, the city promotes youth engagement, community science, and participatory action research, through UNU-IAS OUIK. These activities not only enhance ecological monitoring and environmental literacy but also reinforce Kanazawa’s identity as a biocultural landscape.

Complementary initiatives strengthen this integrated approach. The “Future Farm Town” project demonstrates a compost-to-farm circular economy model that merges sustainable agriculture, solid waste management, and place-based education. The city is also advancing clean transportation, low-carbon mobility, and heritage-sensitive urban design, blending cultural preservation with climate resilience. Altogether, these efforts show how Kanazawa leverages its cultural assets, ecological knowledge, and community engagement mechanisms to build a regenerative, circular, and inclusive urban nature agenda.

What other cities can learn

Kanazawa provides the following advice for other cities:

  • Start with existing cultural and ecological assets rather than creating entirely new systems.
  • Embed participatory action research and hands-on activities to build local ownership and legitimacy.
  • Build mutual trust among stakeholders over time; although trust-building is slow, it is essential to ensure long-term success and continuity.
  • Use simple and transparent monitoring metrics early on to demonstrate value, support learning, and secure long-term institutional and financial support.
  • Avoid purely top-down approaches; co-design initiatives with communities, youth, and landowners from the outset.
  • Urban nature restoration is most effective when culture and ecology are treated as inseparable. In Kanazawa, traditional gardens and forests are conserved not only as heritage, but as living ecosystems, linking climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and human wellbeing through place-based actions.
  • Small, community-led actions such as garden cleaning, biodiversity monitoring, or co-creating green spaces can generate powerful ripple effects that later inform city-wide policy, working both bottom-up and top-down in a mutually reinforcing way.
  • Engaging youth and local stakeholders from the beginning transforms restoration projects from short-term interventions into long-term community movements, creating future youth leaders for nature restoration and enabling broader paradigm shifts.

Further resources