Analysing scale, quality and diversity of green infrastructure and the provision of Urban Ecosystem Services: A case from Mexico City

Abstract

Fostering urban resilience requires a social-ecological systems approach that considers the ecological and social feedbacks of cities. In this paper we argue that Urban Ecosystem Services (UES) could increase urban resilience; and that resilient UES depends directly on the quantity, quality and diversity of the green infrastructure that produces them. The case of the western boundaries of Mexico City is used to map and assess these issues. We classified the different settings of green infrastructure as Service Providing Units (SPUs) and identified their provision of UES through remote sensing techniques; the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) combined with fieldwork verification in two scales of analysis, the local and regional. The results reveal that the vast majority of green infrastructure has low quality, hindering the provision of the UES required for building Mexico City´s resilience. At the regional scale, the growing pressures of urban development and the consequent reduction of SPUs threatens the delivery of provisioning ecosystem services while at the local scale, the low quality of SPUs threatens the provision of regulating ecosystem services. We argue that addressing these challenges could improve the design and implementation of environmental decision-making and urban policy towards more resilient urban social-ecological systems.