Who Pays the Bill? Assessing Ecosystem Services Losses in an Urban Planning Context

Abstract

While Ecosystem Services (ES) are crucial for sustaining human wellbeing, urban development can threaten their sustainable supply. Following recent EU directives, many countries in Europe are implementing laws and regulations to protect and improve ES at local and regional levels. However, urban planning regulations already consider mandatory compensation for the loss of nature, and this compensation is often restricted to replacing green with green in other locations. This situation might lead to the loss of ES in areas subject to urban development, a loss that would eventually be replaced elsewhere. Therefore, ES assessments should be included in urban planning to improve the environmental conditions of urban landscapes where development takes place. Using an actual planning and development example that involves a proposed road to a restructured former industrial area in Bochum, Germany, we developed an ad-hoc assessment to compare a standard environmental compensation approach applying ES. We evaluated the impact of the planned construction alternatives with both approaches. In a second step, we selected the alternative with a lower impact and estimated the ES losses from the compensation measures. Our findings show that an ES assessment provides a solid basis for the selection of development alternatives, the identification of compensation areas, and the estimation of compensation amounts, with the benefit of improving the environmental quality of the affected areas. Our method was effective in strengthening urban planning, using ES science in the assessment and evaluation of urban development alternatives.