The State of the Art of Use of the Concept of Ecosystem Services within Spatial Plans in the Czech Republic

Jiří Schneider,Hana Kubíčková

doi:10.3390/su12219000

Abstract

Although the use and management of ecosystem services (ES) resources and the promotion of their provision are a standard and necessary part of spatial planning tools and documents, a direct implementation of this concept is exceptional. Researchers and entire projects have so far focused mainly on identification of ecosystem services and their resources in urban environment, or on the analysis of their occurrence in spatial planning documents. That was the goal of our research as well. Spatial planning documents, systematically and methodically re-defined using ecosystem services, are what is still lacking. Our article presents the results of the analysis of the use of ecosystem services in spatial plans of five cities, regional centers in the Czech Republic. We used a text evaluation methodology focused on the explicit and implicit expression of ecosystem services. We analyzed the overall approach to the creation of spatial plans. In addition to the spatial plans, we also analyzed their assignments (SPA). We found that the current spatial planning methodology does not work with the ecosystem services approach (ESA) systemically. It focuses mainly on ES resources and implicitly envisages their provision. SPAs are a more flexible and effective tool for enforcing ESA in spatial planning than the lengthy legislative process. However, this presupposes greater knowledge of SPA among the public and decision makers.

Highlights

Studies were conducted to examine whether ecosystem services were included in spatial planning documents and by what process they were integrated in individual documents [1,2,10,16,17,18,19,20,21]
Studies addressing ecosystem services and incorporating them into spatial planning documents have shown that while only a few documents explicitly referred to ecosystem services, many documents found indirect references to the benefits of ecosystems of natural green areas contained in the spatial planning document [1,16,17,18,19,20,21]
Attention was paid mainly to indicators and ways in which researchers analyzed the use of ecosystem services in spatial plans

Summary

Introduction

The direct integration of the concept of ecosystem services and their categories into spatial planning documents could facilitate the way for the inclusion of information on both the environment and public values in the implementation of the process of sustainable territorial development [7]. The inclusion of ecosystem services in land use plans is considered an indicator of their quality [2] Authors such as [10] have addressed this issue in the last decade; [2,11,12,13,14,15] by solving the process of integration of ecosystem services into spatial planning. This article focuses mainly on ecosystem services, ecosystem disservices are an important phenomenon for spatial planning

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion