Frontiers in Ecosystem Services: Planning the Changing Urban Landscapes

Dear Colleagues,

Human health and well-being in urban environments are unquestionably dependent on the functioning of ecosystems, on the services they provide that are necessary for supplying material and non-material factors to people (Butler, C. D., and W. Oluoch-Kosura. 2006), and on the ways they are managed for urban dwellers (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2009).

Understanding the nexus among urban ecosystems’ functioning, landscape patterns’ changes, and socio-demographic trends is crucial to achieving the global sustainable development agenda in the upcoming decades.

Urbanization is a very complex process that features landscapes with densification, sprawling, and shrinkage patterns and has various impacts on land and the environment (Haase et al., 2014).

The population growth in the last two hundred years has been focused on urban areas with increasing demand for resources and energy, as well as loss of biodiversity (McDonald et al., 2020). However, even if all cities continue to attract large numbers of residents as expected, especially due to strong migratory waves and in megacities of the global South, stagnation or even depopulation have been unveiled as phenomena of declining shrinking cities in many urban contexts in the Northern Hemisphere (Lima and Eischeid, 2017).

Consequently, the complexity of urbanization dynamics requires exploring the multifaceted ecological and environmental implications across changing urban landscapes.

The latter reflect emerging development crises, which include the unsolved one induced by climate change and the very recent one caused by the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises challenge our ability to advance a new generation of development policies that put nature at the center, prompting an urgent call for green infrastructure planning to protect human physical and mental health (Pamukcu-Albers et al., 2021).

Although urban ecosystems have been at the core of a well-established research agenda for many years, a body of both theoretical perspectives and experimental approaches to ecosystem-based urban governance, policies, and planning practices must grow in order to continuously inform the research covering the diversity of urban landscapes, which have witnessed an unprecedented convergence of crises. In particular, ecosystem services (ES), an approach that is a cornerstone of urban sustainability, is widely impeded by the narrow use of information on it at the planning level of decision making (Geneletti, 2011), institutional and social empowerment failures (Kronenberg, 2015), and science–policy–governance gaps, and the concept of ES is misaligned with existing planning frameworks and tools (Kremer et al., 2016). ES still needs to be further explored as the most important path to face urban disruption and underused or abandoned spaces. Additionally, the context of the Global South’s urban ecosystems is often poorly understood, with a paucity of research, primarily because most available information is from the Global North (Escobedo, 2021). This also poses great problems in terms of environmental justice, which are exacerbated by a lack of access to primary resources during COVID-19 (Patel et al., 2020).

This Special Issue aims to cover the latest frontiers in managing ecosystem services to support real-life decision-making processes at the levels of spatial planning, urban policymaking, and urban landscape design, in light of current challenges faced by cities worldwide.

We encourage researchers and practitioners to submit original research articles, case studies, and critical essays on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• New interdisciplinary and integrated analytical tools, spatially explicit methods, experimental and modeling approaches to investigate and address questions involving both ecosystem services and human well-being in urban areas;
• Heuristic perspectives toward cross-boundary approaches and scaling of environmental problems and policies with a focus on urban landscapes;
• Advanced use of indicators of urban landscape sustainability policymaking to overcome limitations of comparative research and support field-based study, incorporating knowledge of the variability, thresholds, drivers, and cross-scale linkages of ecosystems’ functions and services relevant to the well-being of urban dwellers;
• Planning regimes’ strengths and weaknesses to realize opportunities in urban green infrastructure and ecosystem services in developing countries;
• Rethinking ecosystem services and trade-off for shrinking urban landscapes;
• Collaboration and policy co-production with communities in the use of spatial planning tools and urban design practice to promote sustainable neighborhoods;
• Green infrastructure planning “value” and its impact on health, social, economic, and environmental outcomes, including new framework and methods for monitoring the implementation of planning and policy tools at a local scale;
• New frontiers in managing ecosystem services to increase urban climate and pandemic resilience according to different geographical and social contexts;
• The nexus among urban ecosystem services users, land property regimes, and planning/administrative systems.

This Special Issue welcomes outcomes of the dissemination and exploitation activites from the Erasmus+ project URGENT: Urban Resilience and Adaptation for India and Mongolia: curricula, capacity, ICT and stakeholder collaboration to support green & blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions 619050-EPP-1-2020-1-DE-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP.

References

Butler, C. D., W. Oluoch-Kosura. (2006). Linking future ecosystem services and future human well-being. Ecology and Society 11(1): 30. [online]

Escobedo F.J. (2021). Understanding Urban Regulating Ecosystem Services in the Global South. In: Shackleton C.M., Cilliers S.S., Davoren E., du Toit M.J. (eds) Urban Ecology in the Global South. Cities and Nature. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67650-6_9

Geneletti,D. (2011). Reasons and options for integrating ecosystem services in strategic environmental assessment of spatial planning. International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management, 7, 3, 143–149

Haase, D., Frantzeskaki, N. & Elmqvist, T. (2014). Ecosystem Services in Urban Landscapes: Practical Applications and Governance Implications. AMBIO 43, 407–412. doi.org/10.1007/s13280-014-0503-1

Haines-Young, R., Potschin, M. (2009). The links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. In Raffaelli, D. & C. Frid (eds.): Ecosystem Ecology: a new synthesis. BES Ecological Reviews Series, CUP, Cambridge

Kremer, P., Hamstead, Z., Haase, D., McPhearson, T., Frantzeskaki, N., Andersson, E., ... & Elmqvist, T. (2016). Key insights for the future of urban ecosystem services research. Ecology and Society, 21(2).

Kronenberg, J. (2015). Why not to green a city? Institutional barriers to preserving urban ecosystem services. Ecosystem services, 12, 218-227.

Lima, M. F., & Eischeid, M. R. (2017). Shrinking cities: rethinking landscape in depopulating urban contexts. Landscape Research, 42, 7, doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1372167

McDonald, R. I., Mansur, A. V., Ascensão, F., Crossman, K., Elmqvist, T., Gonzalez, A., ... & Ziter, C. (2020). Research gaps in knowledge of the impact of urban growth on biodiversity. Nature Sustainability, 3(1), 16-24.

Pamukcu-Albers, P., Ugolini, F., La Rosa, D., Grădinaru, S. R., Azevedo, J. C., & Wu, J. (2021). Building green infrastructure to enhance urban resilience to climate change and pandemics. Landscape Ecology volume 36, 665–673

Patel A. (2020). Preventing COVID‐19 Amid Public Health and Urban Planning Failures in Slums of Indian Cities, World Medical & Health Policy, 12(3), 266-273

Dr. Viviana Pappalardo
Dr. Daniele La Rosa
Guest Editors

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• spatial planning
• urban ecosystem services
• urban sustainability