Enabling Green And Blue Infrastructure Potential In Complex Social-Ecological Regions: A System Approach For Assessing Local Solutions

Nature in cities can provide a number of ecological, social and economic benefits to citizens. These benefits are also referred to as ecosystem services. Low impact urban development and renaturing of cities is difficult if only one or a few of the benefits from urban ecosystem services are focused on when developing a new neighbourhood. Urban development often balances needs for private residential space against the need for public spaces for recreation. Public green spaces often have a number of additional ecosystem services which benefit the wider public interest in a city, but are not accounted for in planning. This is especially true for so-called regulating ecosystem services, such as surface water management and pollination. A special challenge in assessing ecosystem services from blue green structures in cities concerns the need to map and value structures in detail at property level. In order to know which ecosystem services are ?delivered? and at what level, it might be necessary to know tree crown volume and tree species, or species composition of flowering plants in a garden. Other small structures that may go under the urban planning ?radar? include existing roofs pocket parks, green structures in streets such as street trees. At the same time, summing up values of ecosystem services to neighbourhood or city district level is necessary in order to prioritise plans. Currently, there is a lack of high resolution mapping of green structures and their ecosystem services, as well as modelling tools that can assess such data at aggregated levels. The Norwegian case study in ENABLE is Oslo. We have developed and tested methods that enable mapping and valuation of biodiversity and regulating services at property and neighbourhood level. We have demonstrated how such multi-criteria decision support tools can be used to assess trade-offs between interests in urban planning and local development projects.

Kompetanse: utvikling og testing av kartleggingsverktøy, verdsettingsmetoder og beslutningsstøtte-metoder for friluftslivsverdier, bytrær og grønne tak i Oslo. Adferd: Lett tilgjengelig digitale kart om bynaturkvaliteter kan på sikt ? og i kombinasjon med eiendomsmeglerdata - bidra til endret adferd i valg av bolig. Praksis: bidrag til en norsk standard for verdisetting av bytrær. Dette ventes å styrke praksis i byutviklingsprosjekter med vern av trær i byggefasen, og evt. kompensasjon for skader og tap av trær i offentlige rom. Lett tilgjengelige digitale kart om potensiale for økosystemtjenester av grønne tak vil kunne bistå Oslo Kommune i gjennomføring av dets Strategi for Grønne Tak. Politikk: synliggjøring av urbane økosystemtjenester vil bidra til optimal planlegging av bynatur i rullering av kommuneplaner. Resultater om betydning av grøntområder som grønne tilfluktsrom under covid-19 lockdown vil på sikt kunne bidra til vern og integrering i kommunens beredskapsplaner.

Green and blue infrastructure (GBI) is now rapidly recognized throughout the world for its multifunctionality and its large potential to effectively address emerging global challenges. The unique multifunctionality results in that GBI may at the same time may deliver societal benefits while also supporting biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives. However, unlocking this multifunctional potential has been largely overlooked both in research, policy and planning and the underlying hypothesis of ENABLE is that unlocking the GBI potential will require the alignment of a number of critical enabling factors (e.g. user rights, accessibility and structural position) many of which remain unstudied or even recognized. ENABLE aims to fill these gaps by utilizing a transdisciplinary systems approach to examine the fundamental relationships between social-ecological dynamics affecting GBIs potential to meet multi-functional goals, including biodiversity conservation.