Abstract
Recently, the concept of Ecosystem Services (ESs) has undergone a process of mainstreaming. It has been promoted in multiple policy documents and investigated in a growing number of studies addressing the functioning, assessment and management of ESs. Despite a general recommendation to integrate ESs into planning processes, this step remains highly critical yet far from complete. This paper explores the feasibility of the recommended uses of ESs for planning purposes by examining the needs of planners and decision-makers. A systematic literature review was conducted analysing different studies to overcome the limited adoption of ESs in planning verifying their operationalisation for planning practices. The paper classifies different purpose(s) assigned to ESs supporting the planning process. The results show that few experiments have adopted a step-by-step procedure facilitating the integration of ESs into planning and highlighting their added value in each phase of the planning process. In these cases, an ES-based Green Infrastructure has allowed for their integration into planning, also adopting a multi-scale spatial dimension. More practical experiments on how a planning process works are needed to operationalise the ESs concept for planning purposes, also reinforcing the role of the Strategic Environmental Assessment that is still marginal.
Highlights
The concept of Ecosystem Services (ESs) has undergone a process of mainstreaming
As previously explained in the introduction, this paper aims to assess and classify the proposals made by studies and research on possible ways for ESs to be integrated into planning, verifying whether or not they are functional to the planning practice and, if they can be applied in the process of drafting a plan or programme
The second group of questions aimed to analyse the operationalisation of the aforeArticles included in the literature review were initially catalogued according to mentioned purposes assigned to ESs for the planning process, and whether or not these key question, to understand what purpose(s) were assigned to ESs in the planning proc proposals have allowed for their integration into the planning process: and why planners should adopt ESs and what added value ES-based planning offered
Summary
The concept of Ecosystem Services (ESs) has undergone a process of mainstreaming. The results show that few experiments have adopted a step-by-step procedure facilitating the integration of ESs into planning and highlighting their added value in each phase of the planning process. More practical experiments on how a planning process works are needed to operationalise the ESs concept for planning purposes, reinforcing the role of the Strategic Environmental Assessment that is still marginal. The concept of Ecosystem Services (ESs) has gained attention in several disciplines, becoming the focus of an intense academic debate around its use in the decisionmaking process for stakeholder awareness both in planning and policy design, and in the promotion of sustainable development [1]. ESs are seen as a concept that could aid in planning and policymaking as a basis for supporting the assumption of decisions, as it provides an umbrella for coordinating different policy instruments in a more strategic and synergistic manner [11]
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