Synergies, Trade-offs, and Losses of Ecosystem Services in Urban Regions: an Integrated Multiscale Framework Applied to the Leipzig-Halle Region, Germany

By Dagmar Haase, Nina Schwarz, Michael W. Strohbach, F. Kroll, Ralf Seppelt. 2012

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Because we have entered the 'millennium of the cities', urban ecological research needs to account for the provisions ecosystem services provide to urban regions. In urban areas, ecosystem service assessment studies need to account for the complex land use patterns, which change over relatively short periods of time. We discuss an analytical framework for the spatial and temporal integration of different ecosystem services in an urban region to determine synergies, trade-offs and losses, and we employ a case study in Leipzig-Halle, Germany. The following five ecosystem services, which are of special importance for urban areas, were selected: local climate regulation, recreation potential, biodiversity potential, food supply, and above-ground carbon storage. These services were analyzed from 1990 to 2006. Our results identified only slight increases in urbanization (1% or 3 km²) and in mining restoration (-11 km²). However, the detected land use changes led to synergies with biodiversity and climate regulation of > 50% of the total area, whereas trade-offs of approximately 60% were detected between variables such as climate regulation and recreation. Finally, we address both the opportunities and the challenges that were encountered in the integration study, specifically with respect to the application in land use planning.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5d8e351aa7b3d408c66eca6f9d2ef682c92cf72

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Citations in the corpus

Creating win-wins from trade-offs? Ecosystem services for human well-being: A meta-analysis of ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies in the real world (2014, background): “In some cases however, these synergies may come at the cost of trade-offs between ES within different parts of the system (Haase et al., 2012; Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010).”
A review on trade-off analysis of ecosystem services for sustainable land-use management (2016, background): “In addition, it can also facilitate scientists and policy makers a better understanding of the potential consequences of unbalanced treatment of the ecosystem services in the process of land-use management (Haase et al., 2012).”
A quantitative review of relationships between ecosystem services (2014, background): “When both services change positively in the same direction, the relationship between two ES is defined as synergistic (Haase et al., 2012) - this is often called also a ‘win-win’ relationship (Howe et al., 2014).”
From Multifunctionality to Multiple Ecosystem Services? A Conceptual Framework for Multifunctionality in Green Infrastructure Planning for Urban Areas (2014, methodology): “The synthesis of GI and ES theory into one framework seems promising, as ES research discusses several relevant aspects for multifunctional planning such as how to enhance ES in a beneficial way while avoiding trade-offs (e.g., Chan et al. 2012; Haase et al. 2012).”
Sustaining Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (2019, background): “2012), while synergies occur when both services increase or decrease in tandem (Bennett et al. 2009; Haase et al. 2012).”