The need to find new approaches to the development of cities is becoming increasingly urgent in this age of continuing population growth, demographic transition, climate change, fossil fuel peak and biodiversity losses. Restoring ecosystem services and promoting biodiversity is essential to sustainable development – even in the built environment. Ecosystem Services come to Town: greening cities by working with nature demonstrates how to make urban environments greener. It starts by explaining how, by mimicking nature and deliberately creating habitats to provide ecosystem services, cities can become more efficient and more pleasant to live in. The history of cities and city planning is covered with the impacts of industrial urban development described, as well as the contemporary concerns of biodiversity loss, peak oil and climate change. The later sections offer solutions to the challenges of sustainable urban development by describing and explaining a whole range of approaches and interventions, beginning at the regional scale with strategic green infrastructure, looking at districts and precincts, with trees, parks and rain gardens and ending with single buildings, including with green roofs and living walls. Technical enough to be valuable to practitioners but still readable and inspirational, this guide demonstrates to town planners, urban designers, architects, engineers, landscape architects how to make cities more liveable.

The book analyses the relationship between ecosystem services, green and blue infrastructures (GBI) and spatial planning in Italy. It provides insights on the opportunities and challenges in the adoption of an ecosystem services (ES)-based approach for Spatial Planning exploring methods and techniques for the design of GBI strategies. Nowadays, there is an advance in ES knowledge and a recognition of the benefits of GBI for the quality of human life and biodiversity conservation. The main challenge remains how this knowledge could be integrated into the planning process and how it could guide the decision-making process towards sustainable development for contemporary cities. The book collects innovative Italian experiences providing important considerations for operationalizing the ES concept and highlighting different disciplinary attitudes and methodological approaches with the common goal to enhance human well-being.

Climate Change and Cities bridges science-to-action for climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts in cities around the world.

The school of thought surrounding the urban ecosystem has increasingly become in vogue among researchers worldwide. Since half of the world's population lives in cities, urban ecosystem services have become essential to human health and wellbeing. Rapid urban growth has forced sustainable urban developers to rethink important steps by updating and, to some degree, recreating the human-ecosystem service linkage. Assessing, as well as estimating the losses of ecosystem services can denote the essential effects of urbanization and increasingly indicate where cities fall short. This book contains 13 thoroughly refereed contributions published within the Special Issue “Urban Ecosystem Services”. The book addresses topics such as nature-based solutions, green space planning, green infrastructure, rain gardens, climate change, and more. The contributions highlight new findings for landscape architects, urban planners, and policymakers. Important future cities research is considered by looking at the system connectivity between the social and ecological sphere--via varying forms of urban planning, management, and governance. The book is supported by methods and models that utilize an urban sustainability and ecosystem service-centric focus by adding knowledge-base and real-world solutions into the urbanization phenomenon.

One of the aims of the CoLUPSIA project is to explore options for establishing payments for ecosystem services (PES) within the two districts where the project is working: Seram and Kapuas Hulu. These guidelines were prepared to support the CoLUPSIA team in completing this assessment and have since been revised to incorporate some findings from the field assessments.

The school of thought surrounding the urban ecosystem has increasingly become in vogue among researchers worldwide. Since half of the world’s population lives in cities, urban ecosystem services have become essential to human health and wellbeing. Rapid urban growth has forced sustainable urban developers to rethink important steps by updating and, to some degree, recreating the human–ecosystem service linkage. Assessing, as well as estimating the losses of ecosystem services can denote the essential effects of urbanization and increasingly indicate where cities fall short. This book contains 13 thoroughly refereed contributions published within the Special Issue “Urban Ecosystem Services”. The book addresses topics such as nature-based solutions, green space planning, green infrastructure, rain gardens, climate change, and more. The contributions highlight new findings for landscape architects, urban planners, and policymakers. Important future cities research is considered by looking at the system connectivity between the social and ecological sphere—via varying forms of urban planning, management, and governance. The book is supported by methods and models that utilize an urban sustainability and ecosystem service-centric focus by adding knowledge-base and real-world solutions into the urbanization phenomenon.

Urbanization is a global phenomenon and the book emphasizes that this is not just a social-technological process. It is also a social-ecological process where cities are places for nature, and where cities also are dependent on, and have impacts on, the biosphere at different scales from local to global. The book is a global assessment and delivers four main conclusions: Urban areas are expanding faster than urban populations. Half the increase in urban land across the world over the next 20 years will occur in Asia, with the most extensive change expected to take place in India and China Urban areas modify their local and regional climate through the urban heat island effect and by altering precipitation patterns, which together will have significant impacts on net primary production, ecosystem health, and biodiversity Urban expansion will heavily draw on natural resources, including water, on a global scale, and will often consume prime agricultural land, with knock-on effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services elsewhere Future urban expansion will often occur in areas where the capacity for formal governance is restricted, which will constrain the protection of biodiversity and management of ecosystem services

The book addresses the challenges of urban water security and adaptive management in Sub-Saharan Africa, exploring and interlinking novel concepts of ecosystems services, watershed investments, and boundary work. Specifically, the book’s goals are to (i) present a conceptual framework for the urban water sector from an ecosystem services perspective, highlighting the specificities of the Sub-Saharan context; (ii) develop an operational approach to designing and assessing the impacts of watershed investments, based on ecosystem services and boundary work; and (iii) test the approach through a case study in Asmara, Eritrea, and discuss the findings and lessons learned that can be applied in other contexts. Through a fully worked out case study, from identification of water challenges and opportunities to spatially explicit modelling, the book offers a sound and accessible, coverage of issues and proposed solutions to better operationalize ecosystem services, watershed investments and boundary work, to promote adaptive management, and achieve water security in the context of rapidly developing cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. The book is an effective tool for capacity building of diverse stakeholders on the urban water sector, including water managers, local and national policy-makers as well as a suitable resource for both undergraduate and post-graduate courses in planning and geography.

This book advocates a more thoughtful approach to urban water management. The approach involves reducing water consumption, harvesting rainwater, recycling rainwater and adopting Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) where surface water is not sent straight to drains but is intercepted by features like green roofs, rain gardens, swales and ponds.Cities in particular need to change the existing linear model of water consumption and use to a more circular one in order to survive. The Water Sensitive City brings together the various specialised technical discussions that have been continuing for some time into a volume that is more accessible to designers (engineers and architects), urban planners and managers, and policymakers.

Urban biodiversity is an increasingly popular topic among researchers. Worldwide, thousands of research projects are unravelling how urbanisation impacts the biodiversity of cities and towns, as well as its benefits for people and the environment through ecosystem services. Exciting scientific discoveries are made on a daily basis. However, researchers often lack time and opportunity to communicate these findings to the community and those in charge of managing, planning and designing for urban biodiversity. On the other hand, urban practitioners frequently ask researchers for more comprehensible information and actionable tools to guide their actions. This book is designed to fill this cultural and communicative gap by discussing a selection of topics related to urban biodiversity, as well as its benefits for people and the urban environment. It provides an interdisciplinary overview of scientifically grounded knowledge vital for current and future practitioners in charge of urban biodiversity management, its conservation and integration into urban planning. Topics covered include pests and invasive species, rewilding habitats, the contribution of a diverse urban agriculture to food production, implications for human well-being, and how to engage the public with urban conservation strategies. For the first time, world-leading researchers from five continents convene to offer a global interdisciplinary perspective on urban biodiversity narrated with a simple but rigorous language. This book synthesizes research at a level suitable for both students and professionals working in nature conservation and urban planning and management.