The value of urban ecosystem services in New York City: A spatially explicit multicriteria analysis of landscape scale valuation scenarios

Peleg Kremer, Zoé A. Hamstead and Timon McPhearson

Environmental Science & Policy, 2016, vol. 62, issue C, 57-68

Abstract: Mapping, modeling, and valuing urban ecosystem services are important for integrating the ecosystem services concept in urban planning and decision-making. However, decision-support tools able to consider multiple ecosystem services in the urban setting using complex and heterogeneous data are still in early development. Here, we use New York City (NYC) as a case study to evaluate and analyze how the value of multiple ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure shifts with shifting governance priorities. We first examined the spatial distribution of five ecosystem services – storm water absorption, carbon storage, air pollution removal, local climate regulation, and recreation – to create the first multiple ecosystem services evaluation of all green infrastructure in NYC. Then, combining an urban ecosystem services landscape approach with spatial multicriteria analysis weighting scenarios, we examine the distribution of these ecosystem services in the city. We contrast the current NYC policy preference – which is focused on heavy investment in stormwater absorption – with a valuation approach that also accounts for other ecosystem services. We find substantial differences in the spatial distribution of priority areas for green infrastructure for the valuation scenarios. Among the scenarios we examined for NYC, we find that a scenario in which only stormwater absorption is prioritized leads to the most unevenly distributed ES values. By contrast, we find least variation in ES values where stormwater absorption, local climate regulation, carbon storage, air pollution removal, and recreational potential are all weighted equally.

Keywords: Urban ecosystem service; Spatial multicriteria analysis; Landscape; Ecosystem services valuation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901116300879
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enscpo:v:62:y:2016:i:c:p:57-68

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2016.04.012

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Science & Policy is currently edited by M. Beniston

More articles in Environmental Science & Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().