Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate-responsive cities, a growing literature on green gentrification argues that new green infrastructure, and greenspace in particular, can contribute to gentrification, thus creating social and racial inequalities in access to the benefits of greenspace and further environmental and climate injustice. In response to limited quantitative evidence documenting the temporal relationship between new greenspaces and gentrification across entire cities, let alone across various international contexts, we employ a spatially weighted Bayesian model to test the green gentrification hypothesis across 28 cities in 9 countries in North America and Europe. Here we show a strong positive and relevant relationship for at least one decade between greening in the 1990s–2000s and gentrification that occurred between 2000–2016 in 17 of the 28 cities. Our results also determine whether greening plays a “lead”, “integrated”, or “subsidiary” role in explaining gentrification.

Grups de recerca: Laboratori d’Anàlisi de Sistemes Socioecològics en la Globalització (LASEG) Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ)Erik Gómez-Baggethun thanks the NILS program on Science and Sustainability of the EEA 732 Financial Mechanism (028-ABEL-IM-2014B) for partial funding for this research.Ecosystem services (ES) mapping is attracting growing interest from landscape and urban planning, but its operationalization in actual decision-making is still limited. A clear distinction between ES capacity, flow and demand can improve the usefulness of ES mapping as a decision-support tool by informing planners and policy-makers where ES are used unsustainably and where ES flow is failing to meet societal demand. This paper advances a framework for mapping and assessing the relationships between ES capacity, flow and demand with a focus on the identification of unsatisfied demand. The framework was tested in the Barcelona metropolitan region, Spain, considering two ES of critical relevance for the urban population: air purification and outdoor recreation. For both ES, spatial indicators of capacity, flow, demand and unsatisfied demand were developed using proxy- and process-based models. The results show a consistent spatial pattern of all these components along the urban-rural gradient for the two ES assessed. The flow of both ES mainly takes place in the periurban green areas whereas the highest capacity values are mostly found in the protected areas located on the outskirts of the metropolitan region. As expected, ES demand and particularly unsatisfied demand are mostly situated in the main urban core (i.e., Barcelona and adjacent cities). Our assessment also reveals that the current landscape planning instrument for the metropolitan region mostly protects areas with high capacity to provide ES, but might lead to declining ES flows in periurban areas due to future urban developments. We contend that the mapping of ES capacity, flow and demand can contribute to the successful integration of the ES approach in landscape and urban planning because it provides a comprehensive picture of the ES delivery process, considering both ecological and social underlying factors. However, we identify three main issues that should be better addressed in future research: (1) improvement of ES demand indicators using participatory methods; (2) integration of ecological thresholds into the analysis; and (3) use of a multi-scale approach that covers both the local and regional planning levels and cross-scale interactions between them

Mounting research highlights the contribution of ecosystem services provided by urban forests to quality of life in cities, yet these services are rarely explicitly considered in environmental policy targets. We quantify regulating services provided by urban forests and evaluate their contribution to comply with policy targets of air quality and climate change mitigation in the municipality of Barcelona, Spain. We apply the i-Tree Eco model to quantify in biophysical and monetary terms the ecosystem services “air purification,” “global climate regulation,” and the ecosystem disservice “air pollution” associated with biogenic emissions. Our results show that the contribution of urban forests regulating services to abate pollution is substantial in absolute terms, yet modest when compared to overall city levels of air pollution and GHG emissions. We conclude that in order to be effective, green infrastructure-based efforts to offset urban pollution at the municipal level have to be coordinated with territorial policies at broader spatial scales.

Assessing mismatches between ecosystem service (ES) supply and demand can provide relevant insights for enhancing human well-being in urban areas. This paper provides a novel methodological approach to assess regulating ES mismatches on the basis of environmental quality standards and policy goals. Environmental quality standards (EQS) indicate the relationship between environmental quality and human well-being. Thus, they can be used as a common minimum threshold value to determine whether the difference between ES supply and demand is problematic for human well-being. The methodological approach includes three main steps: (1) selection of EQS, (2) definition and quantification of ES supply and demand indicators, and (3) identification and assessment of ES mismatches on the basis of EQS considering certain additional criteria. While ES supply indicators estimate the flow of an ES actually used or delivered, ES demand indicators express the amount of regulation needed in relation to the standard. The approach is applied to a case study consisting of five European cities: Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm, Rotterdam and Salzburg, considering three regulating ES which are relevant in urban areas: air purification, global climate regulation and urban temperature regulation. The results show that levels of ES supply and demand are highly heterogeneous across the five studied cities and across the EQS considered. The assessment shows that ES supply contributes very moderately in relation to the compliance with the EQS in most part of the identified mismatches. Therefore, this research suggests that regulating ES supplied by urban green infrastructure are expected to play only a minor or complementary role to other urban policies intended to abate air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions at the city scale. The approach has revealed to be appropriate for the regulating ES air purification and global climate regulation, for which well-established standards or targets are available at the city level. Yet, its applicability to the ES urban temperature regulation has proved more problematic due to scale and user dependent constraints