Abstract
Natural infrastructure such as parks, forests, street trees, green roofs, and coastal vegetation is central to sustainable urban management. Despite recent progress, it remains challenging for urban decision-makers to incorporate the benefits of natural infrastructure into urban design and planning. Here, we present an approach to support the greening of cities by quantifying and mapping the diverse benefits of natural infrastructure for now and in the future. The approach relies on open-source tools, within the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) software, that compute biophysical and socio-economic metrics relevant to a variety of decisions in data-rich or data-scarce contexts. Through three case studies in China, France, and the United States, we show how spatially explicit information about the benefits of nature enhances urban management by improving economic valuation, prioritizing land use change, and promoting inclusive planning and stakeholder dialogue. We discuss limitations of the tools, including modeling uncertainties and a limited suite of output metrics, and propose research directions to mainstream natural infrastructure information in integrated urban management.
Highlights
Cities are uniquely positioned to foster a transition to a more sustainable world
A review of existing urban ecosystem services tools (Supplementary Table 1), types of model use (Fig. 1), and experience with InVEST over the course of more than a decade (Supplementary Methods) point to key features of effective decision support tools: (i) production of metrics supported by sound science that are relevant to policy decisions; (ii) flexibility in the type of decisions, scales, or actions the tools can support; and (iii) free and opensource code that can be applied anywhere with accessible data
Using a combination of InVEST and bespoke models, we found that natural infrastructure in Shenzhen reduce extreme weather runoff by 187 million m3 (Table 2), conferring benefits of 25 billion USD in avoided costs
Summary
Cities are uniquely positioned to foster a transition to a more sustainable world. They concentrate human and financial resources; a majority of the world’s population is urban[1], and about 85% of global GDP is produced in cities[2]. A review of existing urban ecosystem services tools (Supplementary Table 1), types of model use (Fig. 1), and experience with InVEST over the course of more than a decade (Supplementary Methods) point to key features of effective decision support tools: (i) production of metrics supported by sound science that are relevant to policy decisions; (ii) flexibility in the type of decisions, scales, or actions the tools can support; and (iii) free and opensource code that can be applied (and/or modified as necessary) anywhere with accessible data. The Shenzhen government expects to use GEP in designing land use plans, assessing management performance of administrative sub-areas, and communicating with citizens about the economic value of local ecosystems This effort mirrors a global interest in economic valuation of ecosystem services with international institutions promoting natural capital accounting[31,32]. We note that the present results do not incorporate the demand for ecosystem services, we are examining this dimension in ongoing research
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