An Integrated Framework for Understanding the Contribution of Ecosystem Services to Urban Metabolism Assessments. Case Studies in London And Lima

Cardenas Mamani, Ursula;Perrotti, Daniela
(2023) 4th International Ecosystem Services Partnership Latin America and Caribbean Conference — Location: La Serena, Chile (6.November.2023)

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Understanding the importance of the city's physical, biological, and social heterogeneities, as well as its processes and activities, is important to overcome current resource and energy consumption trends in cities. Policymakers and urban planners have adopted the Ecosystem Services (ES) concept to recognize nature's role in cities. Yet, the relationship between human activities and ecological processes in urban spaces is underexplored. Urban Metabolism (UM) addresses these environmental challenges by scrutinizing the interplay between anthropogenic processes in cities. The ES concept contributes by including ecosystem processes and functions. This research assesses the contribution of ES in UM assessments by proposing a framework that builds on Natural and Social capital interrelationships, and utilizes "Pressures”, “Drivers” and “State” factors, and evaluates ES supply and demand flows, which can be embedded in the Economy-Wide Material Flow Analysis (EW-MFA), one of the most used mass-balanced methods for assessing resource demand in the UM field. The framework is applied and tested in Lima and London, two cities with contrasting biophysical and socio-economic profiles that also significantly concentrate population and economic activities, providing opportunities to express the contribution of ES to the urban-scale dynamics of resources and emissions. Our simulations forecast spatio-temporal variations of such dynamics in both cities until 2050, based on current resource flow/emission assessments and land-use data. These scenarios contemplate urban sustainability drivers like the Paris Agreement's main objectives, city-scale policy targets, and fluctuating socio-economic indicators like population density and income, which can evolve positively or negatively over time. The application of the framework is these two contrasting cases unravels the sensitiveness of the framework to properly accounting for diverse biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. The resulting insights can guide policymakers and urban planners, raising awareness of nature's value in anthropogenic contexts, and promoting the integration of UM and ES knowledge in urban planning.
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Cardenas Mamani, U., & Perrotti, D. (2023). An Integrated Framework for Understanding the Contribution of Ecosystem Services to Urban Metabolism Assessments. Case Studies in London And Lima. 4th International Ecosystem Services Partnership Latin America and Caribbean Conference, La Serena, Chile. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/268807