Enabling Green And Blue Infrastructure Potential In Complex Social-Ecological Regions: A System Approach For Assessing Local Solutions
Informations
- Funding country
Norway- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- 1/1/2016
- End date
- 12/31/2020
- Budget
- 437,388 EUR
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MILJØFORSK - Environmental Research for a Green Transition | Grant | - | - | 437,386 EUR |
Abstract
Nature in cities can provide a number of ecological, social and economic benefits to citizens. These benefits are also referred to as ecosystem services. Low impact urban development and renaturing of cities is difficult if only one or a few of the benefits from urban ecosystem services are focused on when developing a new neighbourhood. Urban development often balances needs for private residential space against the need for public spaces for recreation. Public green spaces often have a number of additional ecosystem services which benefit the wider public interest in a city, but are not accounted for in planning. This is especially true for so-called regulating ecosystem services, such as surface water management and pollination. A special challenge in assessing ecosystem services from blue green structures in cities concerns the need to map and value structures in detail at property level. In order to know which ecosystem services are ?delivered? and at what level, it might be necessary to know tree crown volume and tree species, or species composition of flowering plants in a garden. Other small structures that may go under the urban planning ?radar? include existing roofs pocket parks, green structures in streets such as street trees. At the same time, summing up values of ecosystem services to neighbourhood or city district level is necessary in order to prioritise plans. Currently, there is a lack of high resolution mapping of green structures and their ecosystem services, as well as modelling tools that can assess such data at aggregated levels. The Norwegian case study in ENABLE is Oslo. We have developed and tested methods that enable mapping and valuation of biodiversity and regulating services at property and neighbourhood level. We have demonstrated how such multi-criteria decision support tools can be used to assess trade-offs between interests in urban planning and local development projects.