Abstract
Regulating ecosystem services provided by urban forests are of great importance for the quality of life among city dwellers. To reach a maximum contribution to well-being in cities, the urban regulating ecosystem services (URES) must match with the demands in terms of space and time. If we understand the matches or mismatches between the current urban dwellers’ desired quality conditions (demand) and the supply of URES by urban forests (UF) in the cities, this will facilitate integrating the concepts of ecosystem services in urban planning and management, but such an assessment has suffered from major knowledge limitations. Since it is complex and problematic to identify the direct demands for URES and the spatiotemporal patterns therein, improving the demand indicators can help to determine the actual requirements. In this paper, a methodological approach based on indicators is presented and demonstrated for two important URES: air quality improvement and global climate change mitigation provided by urban trees and shrubs. Four air quality standards and greenhouse gas reduction targets were used and compared to supplies of the URES in Tabriz, Iran. Our results show that the mean contribution of the URES supply to air quality standards and greenhouse gas reduction targets is modest. Hence, in Tabriz, there is a strong mismatch between demand and supply. Mismatches at the city scale will have to be reduced by both a reduction in pollutant emissions and an increased provisioning of URES supply through urban greenery. The presented assessment approach and the results for Tabriz make it explicit how different the demands and supplies of the two studied URES are, and we expect similar mismatches in many other cities. Therefore, our approach, relatively simple but still realistic and easy-to-apply, can raise awareness about, and the utility of, the ecosystem services concepts for urban planning and policymaking.
Highlights
We explore the possible contribution of urban regulating ecosystem services (URES) supply provided by urban forests (UF) to meeting policy targets and environmental quality standards (EQS) in an urban context
While these ten species collectively constitute 69.2% of the total number of trees, they were responsible for 61.54%, 61.99% and 64.08% of total carbon storage, annual net carbon sequestration and pollution removal, respectively (Table 2)
Our approach, which is based on indicators of ecosystem services, allows assessing the matches and mismatches between URES supply and demand
Summary
For more practical applications, the tools need to be made more applicable for environmental resources management [4,12,13] This is urgent for urban ecosystems [14,15]. Cities are more challenging than natural bodies because they consist of complex, intense, and spatially diverse interactions between socio-ecological systems. Urbanization creates both solutions and problems for urban sustainability [16,17,18,19,20]
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