Abstract
Urban growth alters environmental conditions with major consequences for climate regulation and the exposure of population to heat. Nature-based solutions may be used to alleviate the increasing urban climate pressures, but the climate regulation services that these solutions can supply for and across different urban conditions remains understudied. We comparatively investigate the urban ecosystem service realization (considering the ecosystem service supply and demand spatial interactions) of local climate regulation by vegetated (green) and water-covered (blue) areas across 660 European cities. Results show relatively robust power-law relationships with city population density (average R2 of 0.34) of main indicators of ecosystem service realization. Country-wise fitting for city-average indicators strengthens these relationships, in particular for western European cities (average R2 of 0.66). Cross-city results also show strong power-law relationship of effectiveness in ecosystem service realization with socio-economic measures like Human Development Index and GPD per capita, in particular for the area fraction of city parts with high ecosystem service realization (R2 of 0.77). The quantified relationships are useful for comparative understanding of differences in ecosystem services realization between cities and city parts, and quantitative projection of possible change trends under different types of city growth so that relevant measures can be taken to counteract undesirable trends.
Highlights
Climate change and the urban heat island effect threaten the sustainability of rapidly growing urban settlements and urban population worldwide[1]
The urban heat island (UHI) effects emphasize the importance of local climate regulation as an essential urban ecosystem service, the actual realization of which depends on city function and form, with the latter including the spatial distribution of green–blue urban areas, as well as temporal changes in this by growing urbanization
These results indicate that socio-economic variations reflected in Human Development Index (HDI) and GDP per capita may underlie some main parts of the variations seen in ecosystem service realization effectiveness
Summary
Climate change and the urban heat island effect threaten the sustainability of rapidly growing urban settlements and urban population worldwide[1]. The UHI effects emphasize the importance of local climate regulation as an essential urban ecosystem service, the actual realization of which depends on city function and form, with the latter including the spatial distribution of green–blue urban areas, as well as temporal changes in this by growing urbanization. This emphasizes the importance of good city p lanning[28], including for conservation, restoration, and construction of new urban green–blue a reas[29,30] Such areas can provide various services to urban populations, e.g., urban flood m itigation[12] and more general h ealth[31] and well-being[32] benefits, including cooling required to mitigate UHI effects. How to measure and predictively quantify the zones of influence of such air cooling by green–blue areas is still a challenging research question, but such zones are reported to be in the range of several hundred meters[29,33,34]
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