Ecosystem Services for Planning: A Generic Recommendation or a Real Framework? Insights from a Literature Review

Abstract

Recently, the concept of Ecosystem Services (ESs) has undergone a process of mainstreaming. It has been promoted in multiple policy documents and investigated in a growing number of studies addressing the functioning, assessment and management of ESs. Despite a general recommendation to integrate ESs into planning processes, this step remains highly critical yet far from complete. This paper explores the feasibility of the recommended uses of ESs for planning purposes by examining the needs of planners and decision-makers. A systematic literature review was conducted analysing different studies to overcome the limited adoption of ESs in planning verifying their operationalisation for planning practices. The paper classifies different purpose(s) assigned to ESs supporting the planning process. The results show that few experiments have adopted a step-by-step procedure facilitating the integration of ESs into planning and highlighting their added value in each phase of the planning process. In these cases, an ES-based Green Infrastructure has allowed for their integration into planning, also adopting a multi-scale spatial dimension. More practical experiments on how a planning process works are needed to operationalise the ESs concept for planning purposes, also reinforcing the role of the Strategic Environmental Assessment that is still marginal.

Integrating Urban Agriculture and Stormwater Management in a Circular Economy to Enhance Ecosystem Services: Connecting the Dots

“…As illustrated in Figure 2, for each full-text publication included in the analysis, a similar search strategy to that presented by Ronchi [12] was adopted. In this example, six key questions were applied to evaluate each publication for the ecosystem-based integration of UA and stormwater GIs:…”

Integrating Ecosystem Vulnerability in the Environmental Regulation Plan of Izmir (Turkey)—What Are the Limits and Potentialities?

“…The approach we used can be collocated among the experimental works which want to define new tools and methods for supporting the decision making of environmental planning at different scales [12][13][14]. Particularly, we intend to bridge the gap between theory and the practical utilization of the Ecosystem Service in real planning documents, as indicated by Costanza et al (2017), where the revision of the ES cascade model shows how spatial modelling constitutes a basic pre-condition for achieving the sustainability of plans and projects at different scales [15,16]. However, the application of the ES vulnerability concept to ecosystems is still an emerging topic.…”

Infrastruktura w strukturze funkcjonalno-przestrzennej jednostek terytorialnych

“…Również budowanie świadomości społeczności lokalnych oraz budowanie systemów przetwarzających odpady komunalne przyczynia się do podnoszenia wagi tej funkcji [Kudłacz, 2015]. W przypadku parków świadczenie przez nie usług ekosystemów pozwala na włączanie w realizację tej funkcji samorządów lokalnych już na etapie procesów związanych z planowaniem przestrzennym, jak również zarządzania zielenią [Kaczorowska et al, 2016;Khoshkar et al, 2020;Ronchi, 2021].…”