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- Balfors, Berit, et al.
(författare)
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Impacts of urban development on biodiversity and ecosystem services
- 2016
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Ingår i: Handbook on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Impact Assessment. - : Edward Elgar Publishing. - 9781783478989 ; , s. 167-194
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Global urbanization has increased rapidly and it is expected to continue. Due to the continuing urbanization process, green areas are transformed into areas for housing, industry and infrastructure. As a consequence, ecosystems in urbanizing areas are affected, which results in degradation of habitats, due to fragmentation and disturbances, with significant impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. In cities, green areas are of primary interest to support biodiversity as well as in their role as producers of ecosystem services; that is, services that ecosystems produce to the benefit of humans often without any costs. In addition, publicly accessible urban green areas enhance life quality for urban citizens. To strengthen biodiversity and ecosystem services considerations in the planning process and contribute to the preservation of biodiversity in the long term, a consistent assessment of potential impacts is required. In particular, a landscape approach in urban planning and assessment is needed to address the scales of ecological processes, to strengthen important landscape structures and functions in urban, regional and infrastructure planning. A landscape approach calls for methods for assessing the impacts of human actions on biodiversity at a landscape level, across administrative borders. Such methods should allow an analysis of cumulative impacts of many single planning decisions. Several of the processes involved have a temporal and spatial dimension and are possible to quantify, analyse, and visualize with geographical information systems (GIS) combined with spatial ecological models. This allows for localization and quantification of predicted effects of urbanization on biodiversity components over landscape and regional scales. This chapter addresses impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and urban green areas’ capacity in providing ecosystem services. A brief description of the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services provides a framework for a landscape approach in biodiversity assessments and for the practical examples from the Stockholm region. Related to the assessment, tools for predicting and assessing biodiversity impacts at a landscape level will be discussed as well as planning and management of urban green areas. The chapter concludes with lessons learned and key recommendations for best practice.
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| 2. |
- Maia De Souza, Danielle
(författare)
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Addressing biodiversity and ecosystem services in Life Cycle Assessment
- 2016
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Ingår i: Handbook on biodiversity and ecosystem services in impact assessment. - 9781783478989 ; , s. 140-163
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is to provide a quantification of the potential environmental impacts of goods and processes for the cycle of production from "cradle to grave". Eventually impacts may be translated into damage to three defined Areas of Protection (AoP): Human Health, Natural Environment and Resources. Ecosystem services and biodiversity loss have been proposed as suitable endpoints to quantify damage in the AoP of Natural Environment. Both are complex subjects difficult to be measured with simple indicators due to the different nature of damages involved as well as region specificities. The comprehensive scope of LCA requires a simplification of such complex mechanisms in order to allow evaluating impacts occurring all along the life cycle in diverse locations, hindering the definition of an ideal indicator. Significant data requirements with global coverage and yet allowing for spatial dependency result in substantive challenges for the scientific community. In the first section of this chapter, after a brief introduction to LCA, the environmental mechanisms affecting biodiversity and ecosystems services and their quantitative link to damages to the Natural Environment are presented. The second section introduces the state of the art of the different impact indicator proposals addressing biodiversity loss and change in ecosystem services in the frame of LCA. The review focuses on the effects of land use and land use change as one of the key drivers of biodiversity loss. The last section addresses the main challenges in the quest for good and harmonized indicators, such as data availability; selection of a suitable reference state; spatial differentiation; different biodiversity levels of organization (genes, species and ecosystems); biogeographical area coverage; and scales of assessment and non-linear damage relationships.
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