An evaluation of flood control and urban cooling ecosystem services delivered by urban green infrastructure
2013
Farrugia, Simon | Hudson, Malcolm D. | McCulloch, Lindsay
To inform planning decisions and address climate change impacts in expanding cities, it is desirable to quantify urban ecosystem services like flood control and urban cooling. By comparing with a purpose-built habitat map, this study ground-truthed a method to assess flood control, which was developed by Southampton City Council from surface maps. It was confirmed that infiltration capacity is a good proxy for flood control, leaf area index could represent urban cooling, and thereby both could be used to score urban surface types. A two-tiered system was proposed so that surface maps would be used for city-wide scale, and as they produce similar results that are more accurate at fine scales, habitat maps are used at site level. These surrogates were integrated to produce a Green Space Factor for flood control and urban cooling, wherein a combined score can be generated for particular locations. This could be extended further to include other ecosystem services. The new integrated multi-scale ecosystem service quantification tool could be used by developers and policy-makers to identify target areas in their projects and policies that could benefit from enhanced green infrastructure.
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