Ecosystem services in American land use and environmental planning

Background/Question/Methods

Ecosystem services refer to the beneficial products of functioning ecosystems provided to human society such as water quality, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, waste decomposition, and flood control.  Conceptually, an ecosystem service-based framework represents an advance over many other environmental planning approaches, which isolate other dynamic urban social and economic systems from their ecological counterparts.  Instead, ecosystem service approaches could focus on the impacts of planning decisions on ecological functions, while specifically creating information feedbacks back into planning efforts as a mechanism for protecting and maximize valuable ecological services. 

Results/Conclusions

In this paper, we examine the use of ecosystem services as a new organizing framework for land use and environmental planning. We find that the growing body of research into the measurement and modeling of ecosystem services increases the amount of information available for assessing the relationships between decision-making and ecological systems and offers an opportunity to remake the unidirectional relationships between ecological information and planning. We examine examples in several land use plans and planning situations, demonstrating the use of ecosystem service information in enhancing plan specificity, public investment strategies for ecological restoration, and prioritization for policy implementation.  We argue that an ecosystem service framework provides a more holistically approach that considers the dynamic, spatial, and unintended consequences of planned actions in urban-ecological systems.