- Forests and Climate Change
- Ecosystem services and sustainable urban development (ENSURE)
- Multidisciplinary Baltic Sea- Research (MULTIDOM)
- Global Environmeintal Change
- Research projects
- Climate change
- Ecosystems and biodiversity
- Global environment
- Built environment
- Environmental history
- Environmental policy
- Economy and technology
- Environmental philosophy / Ethics
Enhancing Sustainable Urban Development through Ecosystem Services - ENSURE
Sustainable urban development tends to emphasize higher building densities as a central paradigm, with minimized distances and urban metabolism approaches. In this paradigm urban areas are primarily understood as social-economic-technical systems, for which environmental conditions (e.g. air quality) can be relevant to enable good social-economic conditions and attractive, healthy environments. The significance of urban green is often only assessed in terms of its amenity value, not in terms of all the services that it could provide.
One way to tackle the challenge of sustainable urban development is offered via the concept of ecosystem services that provides a holistic and integrative approach. Currently studies on urban biota, and the benefits and values it provides for humans, are often ignored in planning and management. At the same time urban planning has been criticized for neglecting the social space, the lived and experienced city albeit residents’ experiencing their environment is a key process in the identification of cultural ecosystem services such as recreation, learning, aesthetic enjoyment and health benefits.
Often the connection between ecosystem services, quality of life and planning decisions is not recognized by planners or residents, due to spatial and temporal segregation of the effects. Especially, there is still a lack of knowledge of how specific population groups such as young urban residents with increasingly diverse cultural backgrounds and older people with physical and cognitive frailty experience and value their environments. Finally, while the sustainability of ecosystem services in urban areas depends on biological boundary values for ecosystems’ functioning, and interactions between ecosystem services, it also depends on the interplay of these services with urban economy.
Research objecitves and work packages
ENSURE contributes to a revised conceptualisation of sustainable urban development by better integration of ecosystem services into the urban planning paradigm by filling the gap between natural and social science approaches.
The above objective is pursued as a well integrated set of five work packages (WP) (Figure 1) by:
- quantifying certain key regulating, supporting and provisioning services by measuring the impact of urban green on water quality, flood control, urban air quality, and biodiversity (WP1, leader Professor Heikki Setälä).
- creating relevant knowledge about young and elderly people’s understanding, attitudes and values concerning the urban environment and the role of ecosystem services as part of it (WP2, leader Professor Sirpa Tani).
- evaluating the economic significance of ecosystem services, taking into account resilience to climate change (WP3, leaders Professor Adriaan Perrels and Professor Heikki Setälä).
- investigating the role of social, ecological and spatial scales in urban sustainability, the governance challenges they bring to land use, and opportunities to overcome these (WP4, leader Harry Schulman).
- transdisciplinary research and outreach activities (WP5, leader Dr. Outi Salminen).
Principal investigator of the project: Dr. Susanna Lehvävirta
Figure 1. The program structure and linking of workpackages. ES = ecosystem services.