Abstract
Ecosystem services are essential for cities and are key factors in achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Such services are best delivered through green infrastructure, which works in resourceful, multifunctional, synergistic, and environmentally sensitive ways to deliver ecosystem services and provide alternative cleaner pathways for the delivery of multiple urban services. It is unclear if current research supports the necessary linkages between ecosystem services, cities, and green infrastructure in order to achieve the SDGs. To answer this question, we conducted a systematic review analysing 3392 studies on the SDGs from the WoS database. The contents of 66 of those with relevance to ecosystem services and urban research were reviewed in depth. We applied network-analytic methods to map the relationships of different knowledge clusters of SDGs research (1) across time, (2) across disciplines, and (3) in relation to ecosystem services and cities. The results of our analysis show that research on the SDGs have developed stronger networks from 2010–2018, but this research has not been sustained. Further, whilst research on cities now occupies a central place in the SDGs literature, research on ecosystem services only shows tentative links to both green-infrastructure research and SDGs research. Such literature on urban green infrastructure remains peripheral to the central challenge of sustainable urban transitions. We conclude that when it comes to the SDGs, research articles typically consider urban services independently of green infrastructure. Further, it suggests that green infrastructure is not generally considered as a sustainable alternative to conventional urban infrastructures. To address this serious shortcoming, we recommend transdisciplinary approaches to link urban ecosystem and urban green infrastructure research to the 2030 global sustainability agenda.
Highlights
Since the conclusion of the MDGs, there has been increasing momentum surrounding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and this is apparent from a temporal analysis within the Web of Science database, which is visualized in Figure 3 and Tables 1 and 2
A topic search of “sustainable development goals” in the Web of Science database in July 2018 resulted in 3392 records (Figure 1)
SDGs research, it is evident that research on ecosystem services and the green infrastructure that delivers them is not developed enough to play a central role in addressing the SDGs through sustainable urban development, renewable-resource provision, and the cleaner production of urban services
Summary
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced in September 2015 and included a goal focused on cities, SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities [1]. SDG11 acknowledges the unprecedented urbanisation taking place globally and the significance of this trend for human well-being and its critical importance to global sustainability [2].From 2015 to 2030, over a billion people will join the world’s urban population, thereby increasing the urban share of the global population to 60% [3] with Asia and Africa set to become predominantly urban by the mid-2030s and mid-2040s, respectively [4,5]. Growing cities are not well prepared to accommodate urbanising populations in a sustainable manner [6,7,8]. Because of insufficient and inadequate infrastructural capacity, and because
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