Cities and towns are complex social-ecological systems and their successful, and robust governance derives from deep and resilient interactions between social, economic and environmental factors. In this context the environmental infrastructures (in their broad significance, both natural and built, hard or soft) play a key role to maximize the society well-being, and their management must faced with important challenges to find a political and economic equilibrium.
These challenges are generated by a world that is constantly changing both in environmental (i.e. climate local and global changes and interrelated processes), economic (i.e. market globalization, financial shocks, etc...) and social sense (i.e. urbanization, cities and mega-cities growth, country depopulation, etc...).
As a consequence, the governance and the political decisions have to take into account the changing conditions: the necessity of tools able to predict (if possible) the future implication of present choices is nowadays greatly increasing.
As the world’s cities are becoming increasingly overcrowded and polluted, the expansion of land covered by impervious surfaces combined with climate change lead to new challenges for the relationship between people and urban ecosystems. Among the several components of the urban ecotone, green spaces play a significant role providing different ecosystem services. The development of models that embody the impact of human actions on water, energy, carbon and nutrient cycles that characterize the city context is crucial to the determination and quantification of ecosystem services in current and future scenarios. A multidisciplinary approach is thus required to address the problem of making modern cities more livable and resilient.
The work carried out during the second part of the Action, has been devoted in particular: (1) to develop and validate a mathematical model under the framework of the dynamical system theory; (2) to match the ideas and the methodologies provided by Systemic Design theory with the quantification of Ecosystem Services provided by Green Urban Spaces; (3) to the implementation of a new scoring matrix method able to perform a easy-to-use analysis of Water Ecosystem Services provided by Green Urban Spaces and based on real data.
The efforts performed to include all the previous results under the framework of Benefit-relevant indicators (BRIs) analysis can be indicate as the Action conclusion. The BRI is a recently developed concept that “explicitly reflects an ecosystem’s capacity to provide benefits to society, ensuring that ecosystem services assessments measure outcomes that are demonstrably and directly relevant to human welfare” (Olander et al., 2018).
