Forecasting Agroforestry Ecosystem Services Provision in Urban Regeneration Projects: Experiences and Perspectives from Milan

Abstract

The expansion of urban agglomerates is causing significant environmental changes, while the demand and need for sustainability keep on growing. In this context, urban and peri-urban agriculture can play a crucial role, mainly if associated with an agroecological approach. Indeed, the extensive use of living fences and tree rows can improve the environmental quality, assuring ecosystem services (ES), developing a sustainable urban food system and increasing local productions and the related socio-economic improvements. This study aims to assess the benefits of an agroecological requalification of a dismissed peri-urban area in the South Milan Agricultural Regional Park (Italy), by evaluating two possible scenarios, both involving planting trees and shrubs in that area. The software I-Tree Eco simulates the ecosystem services provision of planting new hedgerows, evaluating the benefits over 30 years. The study underlines the difference between the two scenarios and how the planted area becomes an essential supplier of regulating ecosystem services for the neighbourhoods, increasing carbon storage and air pollution removal. Results were then analysed with a treemap, to better investigate and understand the relationship between the different ecosystem services, showing a notable increase in carbon sequestration at the end of the simulation (at year 30). The study shows a replicable example of a methodology and techniques that can be used to assess the ES in urban and peri-urban environments.

EURAF 2024 Abstract book

“…Recently scholars have highlighted that agroforestry systems, often in the form of urban forest gardens/ food forest (UFG /UFF) can contribute to mitigate some of such negative effects of urbanization in the Global North (Clark and Nicholas 2013, Albrecht and Wiek 2020, Zanzi 2021). UFG's can be considered the most important entry points for agroforestry in urban areas since they can be located, in a flexible manner, in densely populated areas as well as in the outskirts of the cities.…”

Urban Planning Insights from Tree Inventories and Their Regulating Ecosystem Services Assessment

“…In particular, we choose the i-Tree Eco tool as it has become an international standard in assessing ecosystem services and economic values derived specifically from urban trees. Numerous studies have been conducted to validate this tool through case study applications [20,32,33] and comparison and synergy with other tools such as allometric equations or direct measurements [34][35][36][37][38]. At first, i-Tree Eco has been extensively applied in the USA [39][40][41]; since 2010, it has been widely used in other countries and various climatic regions [32,35,37,42,43], and, in recent years, its use has also been spreading in southern Europe/Mediterranean contexts [33,44,45].…”

“…Generally, scholars use i-Tree Eco in urban contexts to define urban green growth models [40], to assess a single ecosystem service as carbon storage [20], or air quality's improvement [35,37], to evaluate the ecosystem services provided by urban parks [32,42], or to compare urban green designs in ecosystem service provision [33]. However, for politicians and urban planners to consider the value of tree-planting in their daily decisions, there is a lack in the development of tools that are easy to use [8,43].…”

Optimization of Ecosystem Services of Shanghai Urban–Suburban Street Trees Based on Low-Carbon Targets

“…The design, planting, and management of street trees in the urban areas and the suburbs greatly differ due to differences in construction concepts in various eras. On the other hand, different population densities lead to differences in demand, which ultimately leads to significant differences in the management goals and finesse of urban-suburban street trees, which may lead to significant differences in the low-carbon contribution of street trees in a given urban-suburban gradient [31,32]. Therefore, to accurately estimate and evaluate the low-carbon contribution of street trees in Shanghai, determine its characteristics and key influencing factors, and propose an optimization strategy for it, this study mainly carried out the following research: (1) the direct and indirect low-carbon contribution of street trees was estimated, and the comprehensive low-carbon effects of street trees in Shanghai were explored; (2) the low-carbon contribution and influencing factors of street trees in two urban-suburban gradient belts were investigated, along with the spatially heterogeneous characteristics; and (3) the key impact of the low-carbon contribution of street trees in Shanghai was analyzed, and an optimization strategy for improving the lowcarbon contribution of street trees in Shanghai's urban and suburban areas was proposed.…”