Advancing the Urban Metabolism agenda across disciplines: An Integrated Framework for understanding the contribution of Ecosystem Services to Urban Metabolism assessments
Short Project description
The purpose of this study is to develop a novel framework that incorporates Ecosystem Services (ES) into Urban Metabolism assessments and consider interdependencies and trade-offs between ES and material and energy flows. Water is among the material flows relevant to the study since is considered an abiotic ES. The framework analyzes the dynamics behind the provision of water flows in urban areas, and what changes the supply of water may face over time due to anthropogenic-caused threats such as climate change and land use change.
Extended project description
The evidence that cities are responsible for accelerated natural-resource erosion and the exacerbated impacts of atmospheric emissions on climate change suggest the need for more systemic resource-use mitigation strategies at the urban scale. Ecosystem Services (ES) analysis offers a vast diversity of methods and techniques to optimize the metabolism of cities through enhanced resource cycling and emission abatement. However, this reservoir is largely untapped in Urban Metabolism research despite substantial progress in ecosystem service knowledge and classification. In response to this knowledge gap, we propose an integrated UM and ES framework to extend the Economy-Wide Material Flow Analysis (EW-MFA). The framework utilizes “Pressures”, “Drivers” and “State” indicators to describe the relationships between anthropogenic and natural systems. Moreover, we propose System Dynamics (SD) as a modelling method that allows the development of temporally dynamic assessments and predictive forecasting. The framework will be applied and tested in a case study, where the use of long-term urban development scenarios will allow identifying patterns and correlations between change in levels of ecosystem-service supply and demand flows. This framework can raise awareness of the value of nature in anthropogenic-dominated contexts and increase the integration of UM and ES knowledge in urban planning.
An example of the framework application can be described by using water flows in the city of Lima, Peru. The ES class from CICES that corresponds to this flow is the abiotic Provisioning ES “Ground and Surface Water used for nutrition, materials or energy”. The application of the conceptual scheme to the case of Lima, and its System Dynamics modelling is illustrated in the visual. The Pressure, State, Supply, Demand and Driver factors and their indicators can be used to feed the SD modeling and to assess change in water flows over time. In this example, State indicators are Groundwater levels and Water flow per water body. Water flow per water body (rivers) and groundwater levels are used as indicators for the Supply factor. Pressure can be identified as climate change, whose indicators are changes in precipitation, temperature, runoff and groundwater level, which affect water supply conditions. Total abstraction of water is used as an indicator for the Demand factor, which can also be represented in per capita values. Official projections for growth population estimations, changes in water flows due to climate change, and reduction of groundwater levels due to urbanization can be used to quantify the ES supply and demand flows for an estimated time period. Finally, since Lima is a growing city, the Drivers are represented in spatial and demographic terms: Population, Income and GDP per capita.
Keywords, main expertise
Urban Metabolism, Ecosystem Services, System Dynamics
Funding body
F.R.S. - FNRS
UCLouvain promotor
Prof. Daniela Perrotti
Urban Metabolism Lab
UCLouvain researcher
Ursula Cardenas-Mamani
External partners
Dr. Vincent (Zhiwen) Luo, University of Reading UK