Greening the City: Payment for Ecosystem Services
How can we capture the value of urban greenery and biodiversity when competing against urban development? The British Ecological Society featured Dr Dan Richard's proposed solution.
Urban green spaces, including parks and private gardens, provide many benefits, or “ecosystem services”, to residents. These benefits include cooling the air, reducing flood risk, and enhancing recreation and physical activity. However, urban green spaces are increasingly under pressure from urban development, partly because of a lack of funding to protect and improve them.
The article external pageGreening the City: Payment for Ecosystem Services in Urban Environments in the British Ecological Society featured the paper Urban ecosystems: A new frontier for payments for ecosystem services by Natural Capital Singapore's Dr Dan Richards and co-author Benjenmin Thompson. In the paper, the authors describe how a financial mechanism called “payments for ecosystem services” could be used to support urban greening and conservation efforts.
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) projects have been used in over 500 places around the world, to provide funding for nature conservation projects. Restaurants that benefit from being located next to public parks could help support their upkeep. Similarly, insurance companies could pay homeowners to plant more vegetation to slow the flow of rain water and reduce flood risk, thus reducing their pay-outs to flooded properties. Urban PES could provide local citizens with an incentive to become better environmental stewards, and could help national governments to achieve their policy commitments to reduce biodiversity loss.
Dr Dan Richards is research coordinator of the Natural Capital Singapore project, which objectives are to assess the current status and health of Singapore’s major ecosystems, and quantify their economic and societal value. This analysis will provide the first national-scale assessment of Singapore's natural capital, and the first assessment for a tropical, heavily urbanised country.