Recently published in Landscape and Urban Planning: my paper with PhD student, Sierra Woodruff, entitled “Ecosystem services in urban planning: Comparative paradigms and guidelines for high quality plans.” You can also find it here.
There is actually very literature on using ecosystem services in American urban planning – most of the recent work is out of Europe or the conservation planning literature (big distinction).
Abstract: Ecosystem services are a powerful tool for land-use and environmental planning, which can help decision makers better understand the tradeoffs between different development scenarios. However, there is limited guidance about how ecosystem services should be used in the land-use and environmental planning context. While existing plan quality guidance for sustainability recognizes benefits of ecosystems by promoting conservation and green infrastructure, it fails to provide specific direction on the type of ecosystem service information to collect and how it should be incorporated into land-use planning pro- cesses. We explore this gap by using criteria from American Planning Association (APA) Sustaining Places guidance to analyze two comprehensive plans: Damascus, Oregon, which uses ecosystem services as an organizing framework, and Cincinnati, Ohio, which has received recognition for advancing the science and art of planning. In addition, we compare the extent to which the plans incorporate ecosystem services (both concepts and language) into their goal setting, fact base, policies, and public participation process. We find that incorporating ecosystem services into land-use planning may help achieve sustainability goals by elevating the importance of conservation and providing a lens to link multiple community objectives. APA rewards these attributes of Damascus’ plan, but fails to identify the plan’s strong ecosystem service strategies or weak analysis of ecosystem service information. Based on these findings, we propose additional metrics to help practitioners incorporate ecosystem services into comprehensive plans.
Our work on “Estimating the Size and Impact of the Ecological Restoration Economy,” was cited in the announcement for a recent presidential memorandum on “Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment,” aimed at The Secretaries of Defense, Interior, Agriculture, EPA Administrator, and NOAA Administrator.
The memo …”encourage[s] private investment in restoration and public-private partnerships, and help foster opportunities for businesses or non-profit organizations with relevant expertise to successfully achieve restoration and conservation objectives.”
It goes on to say…
“Section 1. Policy. It shall be the policy of the Departments of Defense, the Interior, and Agriculture; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and all bureaus or agencies within them (agencies)….
Large-scale plans and analysis should inform the identification of areas where development may be most appropriate, where high natural resource values result in the best locations for protection and restoration, or where natural resource values are irreplaceable. Furthermore, because doing so lowers long-term risks to our environment and reduces timelines of development and other projects, agency policies should seek to encourage advance compensation, including mitigation bank-based approaches, in order to provide resource gains before harmful impacts occur. The design and implementation of those policies should be crafted to result in predictability sufficient to provide incentives for the private and non-governmental investments often needed to produce successful advance compensation. Wherever possible, policies should operate similarly across agencies and be implemented consistently within them.”
Did the Executive Office just require the use of watershed planning for mitigation markets?! This is something I’ve been encouraging for years. It was originally talked about in the National Research Council’s 2001 evaluation, and I wrote about how it could work effectively back in 2010.
Shoulders have been officially brushed off…
Hot off the presses and open access is our paper assessing the size of the “Restoration Economy” – the ecological restoration industry – in the United States.
Estimating the Size and Impact of the Ecological Restoration Economy
Substantial attention has focused on the seemingly high costs of environmental regulations and public investments in ecological restoration. Drawing particular scrutiny have been regulations or public programs that require ecosystem restoration, which is often required to offset some of the environmental impacts of certain types of development, agricultural practices, or other human activities. For example, recent debates over important issues like domestic climate policy and the expansion of the US Clean Water Act have centered on the economic impacts of expanded restoration requirements. Several industry-sponsored reports have suggested a strong negative impact on our economy and on job production.
However, this public debate has occurred in the absence of empirical research on the positive economic impacts of restoration at the national level. What are the national-level economic and employment impacts resulting from environmental restoration, restoration-related conservation, and mitigation actions? Recently, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yale University, and a private equity firm, conducted a national survey of businesses that participate in restoration work in order to answer this question.
Published in the prestigious academic journal, Public Library of Science – ONE, the researchers determined that the U.S. ecological restoration industry directly employs nearly 126,000 workers and generates $9.5 billion in economic output (sales) annually. This means that restoration employs more people than all American iron and steel mills, and nearly as many as the motor vehicle manufacturing industry. They found that these sales support an additional 95,000 jobs and $15 billion in economic output through indirect (business-to-business) linkages and increased household spending. This means that – even without considering all of the economic benefits of ecological restoration (such as improved water or air quality, aesthetics, or recreation opportunities) – the ecological restoration industry has an annual overall economic impact of $24.8 billion. The authors also estimated that this economic impact generates nearly $1.02 billion in yearly local and state taxes, and an additional $2.13 billion for federal coffers.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0128339
