Urban ecosystems: A new frontier for payments for ecosystem services

Abstract

Urban ecosystems provide many benefits to people, including regulation of environmental conditions, recreational opportunities, and positive health impacts. However, many urban ecosystems are under pressure from increasing urbanisation, because the economic benefits they provide are rarely captured by the people who own and manage them. Such ecosystems are seldom economically competitive compared to more profitable residential, commercial, and industrial land uses. To develop more sustainable cities, we require new approaches for encouraging and enabling interventions that maintain, improve and create urban ecosystems. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes are increasingly used to incentivise conservation and changes in environmental management in rural settings, but this approach has rarely been considered in cities. Here, we explain how payments for urban ecosystem services (PUES) could help protect, restore, and manage urban ecosystems. To implement PUES, we must understand the differences between various public and private actors who could potentially provide or benefit from urban ecosystem services. For example, utilities companies could pay for reduced water treatment costs via deculverting streams, homeowners could pay for improved stormwater management via increasing permeable surface area, and business proprietors could pay for street tree installation and maintenance to provide shade and reduce air conditioning costs. Urban densities, land values, and land tenure will impact the types of PUES projects that are most likely to be viable. To be successful, PUES will require an improved understanding of urban ecosystem service science—particularly how service provision changes under different land management practices. Nevertheless, because of the high densities, co‐location, and wide variety of stakeholders that live in cities, there is potential for PUES to become an innovative funding source to support future urban ecosystem management. A plain language summary is available for this article.

Ecosystem service provision by road verges

“…Management can be costly, and current management of road verges often aims to reduce costs while meeting safety guidelines. In some cases, management for ES may be cheaper and provide a win–win, but in most other cases it will provide long‐term financial returns if environmental benefits are accounted for, and could be incentivized through payment for ES (Richards & Thompson, ).…”

“…We argue that this should go one step further by considering other ES and environmental benefits. in most other cases it will provide long-term financial returns if environmental benefits are accounted for, and could be incentivized through payment for ES (Richards & Thompson, 2019).…”

Global Variation in Climate, Human Development, and Population Density Has Implications for Urban Ecosystem Services

“…Furthermore, the construction of specific types of urban ecosystem, such as green roofs and green walls, requires expertise that may be unavailable in developing cities [61]. On the other hand, there are also strong economic forces that threaten ecosystem services in developed cities, including high land prices, which increase pressure to build on green areas, and high labour costs, which make maintaining urban greenery expensive [62].…”

Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Sustainability: An Ecosystem Services Assessment of Plans for Singapore’s First “Forest Town”

“…Urban areas face a range of pressing environmental and societal problems, such as the urban heat island (Arnfield, 2003;Richards and Edwards, 2017), poor air quality (Shi et al, 2020), elevated flood risk (Chadwick et al, 2006), and a lack of public access to nature (Cox et al, 2018). There is an increasing awareness that humans need to make better use of ecosystem services in order to regulate and sustain a healthy planet (Zhang et al, 2019), particularly in urban areas (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999;Gómez-Baggethun and Barton, 2013;Elmqvist et al, 2015;Richards and Thompson, 2019). Through designing greener urban areas with contrasting types of green spaces, it may be possible to provide nature-based solutions to some of the challenges of urbanization (Depietri and McPhearson, 2017;Babí Almenar et al, 2021).…”