Mapping supply of and demand for ecosystem services to assess environmental justice in New York City

Abstract

Livability, resilience, and justice in cities are challenged by climate change and the historical legacies that together create disproportionate impacts on human communities. Urban green infrastructure has emerged as an important tool for climate change adaptation and resilience given their capacity to provide ecosystem services such as local temperature regulation, stormwater mitigation, and air purification. However, realizing the benefits of ecosystem services for climate adaptation depend on where they are locally supplied. Few studies have examined the potential spatial mismatches in supply and demand of urban ecosystem services, and even fewer have examined supply–demand mismatches as a potential environmental justice issue, such as when supply–demand mismatches disproportionately overlap with certain socio‐demographic groups. We spatially analyzed demand for ecosystem services relevant for climate change adaptation and combined results with recent analysis of the supply of ecosystem services in New York City (NYC). By quantifying the relative mismatch between supply and demand of ecosystem services across the city we were able to identify spatial hot‐ and coldspots of supply–demand mismatch. Hotspots are spatial clusters of census blocks with a higher mismatch and coldspots are clusters with lower mismatch values than their surrounding blocks. The distribution of mismatch hot‐ and coldspots was then compared to the spatial distribution of socio‐demographic groups. Results reveal distributional environmental injustice of access to the climate‐regulating benefits of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure in NYC. Analyses show that areas with lower supply–demand mismatch tend to be populated by a larger proportion of white residents with higher median incomes, and areas with high mismatch values have lower incomes and a higher proportion of people of color. We suggest that urban policy and planning should ensure that investments in “nature‐based” solutions such as through urban green infrastructure for climate change adaptation do not reinforce or exacerbate potentially existing environmental injustices.

Designing Urban Green Infrastructures Using Open-Source Data—An Example in Çiğli, Izmir (Turkey)

“…Green Infrastructure (GI), along with other environmental planning tools such as Urban Growth Boundaries, Net Environmental Benefit analysis, and costs for developing, represent an advanced approach to regulating urban expansion, limiting the land take, and increasing the resilience of urban areas [27,28]. The above-mentioned approaches support the application of different measures for re-development and become crucial in practical planning procedures [29].…”

Urban tree canopy has greater cooling effects in socially vulnerable communities in the US

“…15,16 Climate justice has recently emerged as a new and pressing concern in environmental justice research and practice. [17][18][19] Cities dominated by multiple forms of inequality have been created in no small part through historical and ongoing planning practices. For example, housing displacement in urban (re)development can force communities to relocate to more hazardous areas, exacerbating uneven distributions of exposure to environmental hazards.…”

“…20 Experience of excess heat by vulnerable groups not only exemplifies environmental injustice, but also leads to significant health impacts. Neighborhoods deprived of climate-regulating services, such as from urban green infrastructure, may further perpetuate historical inequalities, 14,17 especially if climate change impacts in cities increase the risk of heat waves in vulnerable communities and thus create new environmental justice challenges. 21,22 For example, Million-TreesNYC had its explicit goal of equalizing urban forest, but still failed to ''prioritize low-canopy, low-income communities of color'', mainly because parks, which were already unequally distributed, absorbed 83% of the newly planted trees.…”

“…Planting of urban trees is one of the most widespread forms of intervention aimed at heat mitigation. 29,30 Similar to urban heat, there are large within-city variations in spatial distribution of urban tree canopy (UTC), with socially vulnerable populations living in neighborhoods with less tree cover, 9,17,[31][32][33] resulting in inequitable provision of the cooling benefits of trees. By considering the relationships between presence of tree canopy and social vulnerability, planting of urban trees in prioritized neighborhoods may achieve greater social benefits.…”

“…By considering the relationships between presence of tree canopy and social vulnerability, planting of urban trees in prioritized neighborhoods may achieve greater social benefits. 9,17 Previous studies also discovered that the cooling efficiency (CE) of urban trees, defined as the change in the magnitude of land surface temperature (LST) with one percent unit increase in UTC cover, 34,35 varies in space within and among cities and is affected by biophysical factors such as temperature and wind. 35 However, whether and to what extent UTC can generate greater cooling effects in socially vulnerable neighborhoods is unclear.…”