Pathways to Modelling Ecosystem Services within an Urban Metabolism Framework

Abstract

Urbanisation poses new and complex sustainability challenges. Socio-economic activities drive material and energy flows in cities that influence the health of ecosystems inside and outside the urban system. Recent studies suggest that these flows, under the urban metabolism (UM) metaphor, can be extended to encompass the assessment of urban ecosystem services (UES). Advancing UM approaches to assess UES may be a valuable solution to these arising sustainability challenges, which can support urban planning decisions. This paper critically reviews UM literature related to the UES concept and identifies approaches that may allow or improve the assessment of UES within UM frameworks. We selected from the UM literature 42 studies that encompass UES aspects, and analysed them on the following key investigation themes: temporal information, spatial information, system boundary aspects and cross-scale indicators. The analysis showed that UES are rarely acknowledged in UM literature, and that existing UM approaches have limited capacity to capture the complexity of spatio-temporal and multi-scale information underpinning UES, which has hampered the implementation of operational decision support systems so far. We use these results to identify and illustrate pathways towards a UM-UES modelling approach. Our review suggests that cause–effect dynamics should be integrated with the UM framework, based on spatially-specific social, economic and ecological data. System dynamics can inform on the causal relationships underpinning UES in cities and, therefore, can help moving towards a knowledge base tool to support urban planners in addressing urban challenges.

Urban Ecosystem-Level Biomimicry and Regenerative Design: Linking Ecosystem Functioning and Urban Built Environments

“…Much like the concentration on water flows observed on the Lavasa Hill project, this focus shows us that projects applying ecosystem-level biomimicry to generate regenerative impacts still tend to lack integrating strategies related to the biological and abiotic structure of these ecosystems. This links to urban metabolism theories [44,45] which concentrate on energy and material flows but do not give attention to biodiversity or the role of non-living structures in ecosystems which are crucial to ecosystem health, and therefore the production of ecosystem services that humans are dependent on [46].…”

Information Integration in a Smart City System—A Case Study on Air Pollution Removal by Green Infrastructure through a Vehicle Smart Routing System

“…that the tree cover at route scale provides many other ecosystem services like temperature reduction, shading, amenities, etc. [17,18].…”

“…One limitation of our approach may be that we only consider the air pollution removal aspects of the vegetation cover; nonetheless, we acknowledge that the tree cover at route scale provides many other ecosystem services like temperature reduction, shading, amenities, etc. [17,18].…”

A Spatial Decision Support System for Multi-Functional Landscape Assessment: A Transformative Resilience Perspective for Vulnerable Inland Areas

“…Within the urban studies, the resilient thinking (Bahrami & Hemmati, 2020) [1] has addressed to different aspects of the urbanisation process, e.g. the adaptation of cities to climate changes (Yan et al, 2014) [2], the urban local-spatial resilience (Zhang et al, 2020) [3], urban ecosystem and metabolism (Elliot et al, 2019) [4], and the resilience in spatial planning (Lu & Stead, 2020) [5]. Indeed, many authors have listed meanings of resilience according to multiple research fields and scientific interests, likewise relating it to the landscape concept.…”