Salzau 2010
Abstracts
February 2010
Integrating ecosystem services in strategic environmental assessment of land use plans.
Davide Geneletti
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Trento
Land use planning eventually results in actions that may affect the distribution and quality of
ecosystem services within a region. Hence, it is crucial to use information on ecosystem services
and their importance to support planning processes. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA),
which refers to a range of analytical and participatory approaches that aim to incorporate
environmental and sustainability considerations into planning, provides an excellent platform to
integrate ecosystem services into land-use planning and decision-making. This paper addresses
the open challenges related to ecosystem services-inclusive SEA, and propose some solutions. In
particular, the following issues will be discussed:
1. Land-use planning results in both direct drivers (e.g., physical interventions, such as the
choice of location of land uses), as well as indirect drivers (policies that may affect the way
in which society makes use of ecosystem services). Existing ecosystem- service modeling
studies focus on the effect of direct drivers only. Can the effects on ecosystem services of
indirect drivers be modeled to provide a more comprehensive assessment?
2. A land-use plan focuses on a geographically bounded area. Ecosystem services are
provided and used at different spatial scales, which may be much broader than the
geographic boundaries of a particular land use planning effort. The differences in scale
between the area that is being planned and the area that is being affected in terms of
ecosystem services complicates the process of predicting the effects of land use plans on
ecosystem services. Which services are most critically affected by scale issues in land use
planning, and how can these be addressed in SEA?
3. Existing modeling tools for ecosystem services have been shown to be effective in creating
spatially explicit depictions of alternative future scenarios. The need for scenario analysis is
based on the high degrees of uncertainty and generality in land use planning efforts.
However, the process of analyzing multiple ecosystem functions in different scenario
conditions is associated with extraordinarily high amounts of information. In order to
present information to decision makers in a manageable way, new indicators need to be
proposed that consists of combinations of existing ecosystem services indicators as well as
indicators traditionally used in land-use planning (e.g. indicators of land suitability for
different uses). How can a reasonable set of indicators be devised to represent the
influence of interventions in a plan on multiple ecosystem services?
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