Pathways to Modelling Ecosystem Services within an Urban Metabolism Framework

Thomas Elliot,Benedetto Rugani,Vânia Proença,Samuel Niza,Javier Babí Almenar

doi:10.3390/su11102766

Abstract

Urbanisation poses new and complex sustainability challenges. Socio-economic activities drive material and energy flows in cities that influence the health of ecosystems inside and outside the urban system. Recent studies suggest that these flows, under the urban metabolism (UM) metaphor, can be extended to encompass the assessment of urban ecosystem services (UES). Advancing UM approaches to assess UES may be a valuable solution to these arising sustainability challenges, which can support urban planning decisions. This paper critically reviews UM literature related to the UES concept and identifies approaches that may allow or improve the assessment of UES within UM frameworks. We selected from the UM literature 42 studies that encompass UES aspects, and analysed them on the following key investigation themes: temporal information, spatial information, system boundary aspects and cross-scale indicators. The analysis showed that UES are rarely acknowledged in UM literature, and that existing UM approaches have limited capacity to capture the complexity of spatio-temporal and multi-scale information underpinning UES, which has hampered the implementation of operational decision support systems so far. We use these results to identify and illustrate pathways towards a UM-UES modelling approach. Our review suggests that cause–effect dynamics should be integrated with the UM framework, based on spatially-specific social, economic and ecological data. System dynamics can inform on the causal relationships underpinning UES in cities and, therefore, can help moving towards a knowledge base tool to support urban planners in addressing urban challenges.

Highlights

Increasing urbanisation of the growing global population forces new and increasingly complex challenges into the urban system
We show how the urban metabolism (UM) literature items performed against Ecosystem services (ES) suitability, the remaining four key investigation themes followed by which model types were used to deal with the various types of information
Our results showed that the UM metaphor, subject to some reorientation and increased modelling complexity, has the potential to assess provisioning and regulating urban ecosystem services (UES), strengthening the socio-ecological capabilities of UM

Summary

Introduction

Increasing urbanisation of the growing global population forces new and increasingly complex challenges into the urban system. The demand for marketed goods and services is not without consequences and making them available (extracting raw materials, processing them, transporting, using the products and discarding them) inevitably has impacts on the environment. This can degrade the geobiophysical components and processes of an ecosystem that underpin the biological cycles, and the services they provide. It becomes necessary to understand how urbanisation can be channelled to consolidate and mobilise behaviours and decisions at the urban level to reduce humanity’s effect on ecosystems’ capacities to supply ES at global and local levels. There is still little knowledge on the magnitude, drivers and effects of interregional ES flows, especially for regulating and cultural ES [4]

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