Ecosystem service bundles in global hinterlands

Abstract

In the face of projected increases in globalization and urbanization, there is growing recognition that cities and their hinterlands will play a pivotal role in both creating and addressing the sustainability challenges of the future. Hinterlands, the rural areas that surround cities, are connected to cities as the source of many of the ecosystem services (ES) that are used in urban areas. While much is known about the provision of multiple ES in and around a few well-studied cities, there is a limited amount of consistently measured, global-scale data about the provision of multiple ES in urban areas and their hinterlands. We mapped eight ES globally, and examined how the production of ES varied between the hinterlands (within 200 km) of 768 major city centers (population>500 000). We found that there are seven archetypes of ES supply bundles in global hinterlands. Hinterlands near wealthy cities are specialists in regulating ES production while the poorest and most populated hinterlands are specialists in food production, with low levels of regulating and cultural ES provision. These hinterlands also experience different synergies and tradeoffs between ES, with interesting implications for landscape management. Global teleconnections have likely also played a role in the ES bundles of hinterlands, since they have allowed cities to exploit remote areas to meet their demand for ES, undermining the traditional supply-demand relationship between each city and its proximal hinterland. These results emphasize the diverse, and sometimes inequitable, ways that urbanization and globalization are influencing ES supply in the planet's most human-modified landscapes.

Measuring ecosystem multifunctionality across scales

“…In these examples, the capacity to supply multiple ecosystem services decreased with increasing population densities. A recent study by Haberman and Bennett (2019) yielded very similar findings for metropolitan areas worldwide, confirming that population densities are crucially influencing the supply of ecosystem services. In most cases, only the hinterlands of densely populated areas are capable of producing a high diversity of ecosystem services (see the case of Southern Athens and Portsmouth; Haberman and Bennett 2019).…”

“…A recent study by Haberman and Bennett (2019) yielded very similar findings for metropolitan areas worldwide, confirming that population densities are crucially influencing the supply of ecosystem services. In most cases, only the hinterlands of densely populated areas are capable of producing a high diversity of ecosystem services (see the case of Southern Athens and Portsmouth; Haberman and Bennett 2019). Our results on the spatial co-occurrence of multifunctionality and Land System Archetypes characterized urban areas as coldspots of alpha-multifunctionality across Europe.…”

Urbanization affects how people perceive and benefit from ecosystem service bundles in coastal communities of the Global South

“…As population densities increase, local ecosystems can no longer meet the growing demand for provisioning ecosystem services that, consequently, need to be imported from further away and replaced by non-ecosystem services (Cumming et al 2014). In addition, part of the production in cities' hinterlands worldwide is exported rather than used for local consumption (Haberman and Bennett 2019); this is also the case in the Solomon Islands, for example with logging (Toki et al 2017a). In the Solomon Islands, land ownership can also limit access to ecosystems and the services that they provide because customary tenure of land outside of the city boundaries prohibits use for nonowners (Corrin 2012;Foukona 2017).…”

“…Formal education levels were also higher in urban areas of the Solomon Islands (Lapointe et al 2020a). Furthermore, Gurney et al (2017) have shown that, in a modern, connected world, people can form emotional connections with natural places without being physically connected to those places in their daily lives. In the Solomon Islands, the greater prevalence of stewardship in urban areas could also be due to urban dwellers being more exposed to and conscious of environmental degradation.…”

Mapping ecosystem service supply-demand bundles for an integrated analysis of tradeoffs in an urban agglomeration of China

“…Yet, most current ES bundle studies focused on the ES supply. For example, Renard et al (2015) analyzed the historical dynamics of ES supply bundles in Quebec of Canada, Zhao et al (2018) mapped the ES supply bundles in an urban agglomeration in China, Haberman and Bennett (2019) analyzed the ES supply bundles at the global scale. Few studies have analyzed ES bundles by considering both ES supply and ES demand.…”