From multiple Ecosystem Services (ES) to ES Multifunctionality: assessing territorial transformations in spatial planning

Urban planning discipline initially arose from the need to rationalize and acquire instruments to manage the expansion of urban agglomerations (Salzano, 1998).Through decade this approach, that we consider as a process, suffered the dualism between urbanism and environmentalism generated a distorted perception of the disciplinary principles. On one side, the radicalization of environmentalism perspective that puts nature conservation before any hypothesis of territorial anthropic transformation deemed necessary to pursue socio-economic development objectives. On the other side, the adoption of human-centered socio-economic development models in which several environmental goods and services spontaneously provided by natural ecosystems were not included in “commodities”, i.e. without exchange value. This second paradigm has only recently - and partially - been questioned. A decisive factor has been the recognition and consequent increase in awareness among scientists, politicians and citizens' movements that natural resources are limited. On the basis of these assumptions, this research work is based on the firm conviction that spatial planning is a privileged dimension in which the above factors can converge in a sustainable perspective. This consideration stimulates research questions oriented to balance the conflicting needs of conservation of natural resources, economic development and social equity. The effective handling of the challenges outlined is undermined by the lack of full integration of the environmental components management in the traditional planning system, which, according to the author, can be ascribed to three main weaknesses: - the first weakness concerns the rigidly prescriptive of “zoning” (Cortinovis & Geneletti, 2020). It is based on verifying the suitability of the territory for a specific function and it leads to an a-priori design of the plan aimed at "conforming" development projects and actions to the pre-established strategy (Janin Rivolin, 2008). This aspect, object of criticism by an extensive scientific literature that puts it in opposition to an alternative approach based on the concept of performance (Baker et al., 2006; Faludi, 2000b; Frew et al., 2016; Geneletti et al., 2017; Haller, 2014), has generated criticalities and inefficiencies (Scorza, Saganeiti, et al., 2020). This lack of flexibility depends from the rapidity with which the community needs evolve, making the traditional plan “vintage” and inadequate (Romano et al., 2018). - an additional weakness of the traditional planning system is the overlapping policies and responsibilities at different territorial government levels (Nolte et al., 2010) that are often reflected in cross-scale political contradictions (Apostolopoulou et al., 2012) linked to a range of sectoral policies (Winkel et al., 2015) and a top-down governance gap (L. C. Stringer & Paavola, 2013). As highlighted by the authors (Scorza et al., 2021; Scorza, Pilogallo, Saganeiti, & Murgante, 2020a), this fragmentation affects long-term strategies related to the sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2015), the mitigation and adaptation measures to climate changes (Lovell & Taylor, 2013; Pachauri et al., 2015; Pramova et al., 2012), the conservation of biodiversity (Balletto et al., 2020; IPBES, 2019) and natural resources (Bongaarts, 2019; Primmer & Furman, 2012). - the third weakness concerns the failure of traditional planning in promoting the quality of territorial transformations beyond minimum thresholds depending on technical and sectorial rules. This criticality manifests itself both at urban scale and at territorial scale. For instance, if we refer to the urban context, the assessment of transformations related to urban development including environmental components pursues, in the Italian practice, the traditional approach related to the concept of "urban standard". These are nothing more than minimum thresholds that regulate the availability of services and facilities for each inhabitant, regardless of the assessment of the effective improvement of citizens' well-being (Colavitti et al., 2020; Graça et al., 2018). In the scientific literature, several authors advocate overcoming this approach, highlighting the opportunity to explicitly refer the real needs of citizens generating specific demands for services and urban functions depending on the specific context (Cortinovis & Geneletti, 2020; Gobattoni et al., 2017; Ronchi et al., 2020). At the territorial scale, the fundamental normative framework for the evaluation of territorial transformations is the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). It consists of a coherence check with the binding framework foreseen for the territory in which the project is inserted, and in the consequent agreement/disagreement on the impacts that the project exerts on each component of environmental matrix. The effectiveness of this procedure, already weak in a context where there is no effective process of involvement and participation of decision-makers and stakeholders (R. De Groot, 2006), is further undermined by the absence of adequate monitoring systems of territorial transformations capable of providing a comprehensive and integrated view of the expected effects at several scales (Scorza, Saganeiti, et al., 2020). In spatial planning and land use management, ES constitutes an integrated and robust analytical framework as it is directly related to land use patterns and their changes over time, to the spatial distribution of different spatial components (both natural and anthropic) as well as to the implementation of land use plans and policies (Ronchi, 2018) producing two levels of contributions: informative and methodological. The first refers to the possibility of measuring and spatializing the services that ecosystems provide for citizens' well-being. This implies the possibility to improve the knowledge infrastructure that supports the planning process in its different phases. The spatially explicit assessment of ES can take place ex-ante and provide the elements for deepening the knowledge framework and spatializing the demands emerging from the territory in terms of specific ES (Bolund, Permar & Hunham, 1999). For example, in the urban context it is possible to map areas where there is an unsatisfied demand for recreational services (Giedych et al., 2017; Graça et al., 2018), for local temperature regulation (a service linked to the growing topic of heat islands) (Elliot et al., 2020; Sabrina Lai et al., 2020), or for the absorption of noise and atmospheric pollutants along routes with heavy vehicle traffic (Blum, 2017; De Carvalho & Szlafsztein, 2019). Instead, in the case of ex-post evaluation, ES offer an effective infrastructure for monitoring the actual benefits deriving from the implementation of the planned actions. In addition, we include in this contribution the communicative capacity of this approach towards non-expert stakeholders and decision-makers, which is expressed both by acting as an interface between science and decision-makers (Gustafsson et al., 2020; Perrings et al., 2011), and by contributing to increasing the transparency of the plan process (Karrasch et al., 2014; Schröter et al., 2018). The methodological contribution, instead, refers to support the elaboration and benchmarking of alternative development/transformation scenarios, making quantitatively and spatially explicit the impacts of planned actions on the wider territorial values system (environmental, social, cultural, etc). This reinforces the capacity of rational decision-makers to take “better” decisions (Owens, 2005; Sanderson, 2002; Scorza et al., 2019; Weiss, 1979) by structuring a context-based assessment framework (Gee & Burkhard, 2010; Potschin & Haines-Young, 2013a), tailored to the features of the territorial system’s structure. This dimension becomes even more important when the territorial transformation drivers act in a different scale than the one where impacts become measurable (Scorza, Pilogallo, Saganeiti, Murgante, et al., 2020b). In particular, the focus is on ES multifunctionality intended as the opportunity offered by the ES approach to consider “the joint supply of multiple Ecosystem Services (ES)” (Mastrangelo et al., 2014; Stürck & Verburg, 2017), i.e. the natural capacity of ecosystems to deliver for humans manifold benefits (Hansen & Pauleit, 2014). This concept derives from disciplinary fields related to ecology (Byrnes et al., 2014). It was successively adopted in conservation planning where, for the purposes of biodiversity conservation and enhancement, was applied as a criteria to define priority areas to be protected (Cimon-Morin & Poulin, 2018; García-Llorente et al., 2018; Y.-P. P. Lin et al., 2017; Vaz et al., 2021). In contrast to monofunctional “grey” infrastructures, the European Commission furtherly declined its meaning within the “Green Infrastructure-Enhancing Europe’s Natural Capital” Strategy (European Environment Agency, 2013) where GI are defined and specifically designed to “deliver a wide range of ES”. In this specific application domain, ES multifunctionality has been applied at different spatial scales from the urban to the territorial one (Arcidiacono et al., 2016; Cannas et al., 2018b; D. La Rosa & Privitera, 2013; Sabrina Lai et al., 2018a; Ronchi et al., 2020; Zhang & Muñoz Ramírez, 2019). Whereas initially it constitutes a value in itself (from the perspective of providing as many of whatever ES as possible), aiming at meeting as many demands and valuing co-benefits as much as possible (Hansen & Pauleit, 2014). Recently, the interest in spatial and urban planning disciplines toward the ES multifunctionality approach also increased (Artmann, 2014; Dendoncker et al., 2013; Hansen et al., 2015; Primmer & Furman, 2012). This is due to several factors. Firstly, some authors point it as a useful tool to operationalize the concepts of efficient use of natural resources’ use efficiency (Gómez-Baggethun & Barton, 2013a) and sustainability (R. De Groot, 2006; Dendoncker et al., 2013; Selman, 2009), included among the founding principles of planning (Las Casas & Scorza, 2016a). Secondly, considering several goods and benefits simultaneously, means pursuing several environmental, social, cultural and economic objectives and addressing different potentially conflicting demands in both urban planning and spatial governance. This directly relates to the complexity of socio-ecological systems (Gómez-Baggethun & Barton, 2013b; Murray-Rust et al., 2011) that characterize human settlements: the capacity to supply multiple ES results in perceived benefits, for example in terms of human health, social cohesion and in the diversification of rural economic opportunities (Fagerholm et al., 2020; Lafortezza et al., 2013; Tzoulas et al., 2007). Finally, different authors (Galler et al., 2016a; Uthes et al., 2010) argue that pursuing ES multifunctionality as an objective, makes it possible to increase the efficiency of efforts - including economic ones - to protect the various environmental components. Although there is no unambiguous definition of ES multifunctionality in the literature (Mastrangelo et al., 2014) and there is also a lack of agreement on which ES should be delivered by territorial components in order to be considered “multifunctional” (Stürck & Verburg, 2017), this approach promises to be able to confer several added values to the plan process. In the light of these premises, the research program was structured around one main question: How can the ES multifunctionality approach contribute to renew the planning system placing environmental components as services providers whose availability represents a pre-condition for any sustainable development strategy? Therefore, the general objective is to deepen the ES multifunctionality concept, generalizing a framework methodology supporting the planning process. The research was therefore divided into several steps. An extensive analysis of scientific bibliography was carried out in order to explore conceptualizations, computational methods and applications of ES multifunctionality to selected case studies in order to demonstrate potentials and shortcomings. The thesis structure follows the “three papers” format, which generally consists of a collection of articles recently published in (or submitted for publication to) international peer-review journals. Specifically, this thesis consists of an introductory chapter that places the research agenda within the broader disciplinary framework, five chapters that constitute the main body of the thesis and a final chapter that describes the major findings and outlines the future perspectives of the research. The main contents of each chapter are described below: - Chapter 2 proposes a critical review of the ES multifunctionality in the urban and spatial planners’ perspective; - Chapter 3 has the purpose of illustrating the main computation methods of the ES subsequently implemented in the further case studies; - Chapter 4 describes an original “Cities ranking” applying ES multifunctionality approach based on the Multiple Ecosystem Services Landscape Index (MESLI) formulated by (Rodríguez-Loinaz et al., 2015b). - Chapter 5 is a further application of the ES multifunctionality approach conducted at the national scale. With the purpose is to provide an interpretive framework of the land use dynamics that occurred in the period 2000-2018 based on three different indices of ES multifunctionality. The results show that the settlement dynamics and the territorial transformations occurred, produced a different effect on the three indices highlighting that their joint interpretation can support the definition of ES multifunctionality conservation strategies. The last concluding chapter illustrates the results highlighting that they may contribute to reinforce the planner’s toolkit for a more effective decision-making in managing territorial development (Batty, 2013; Friedmann, 2019; Healey, 2003), defining an up to date methodological framework oriented to enhance the procedural approach in planning (Alexander & Faludi, 2016), grounded on evaluation stage (Weiss, 1972) highlighting lessons learnt and cyclic approach

Ecosystem Services Multifunctionality: An Analytical Framework to Support Sustainable Spatial Planning in Italy

A growing demand at several levels of territorial government concerns the need for toolsto support policy-making oriented towards sustainable planning. That of Ecosystem Services (ES)represents a well-structured and robust methodological framework for developing tools to assessenvironmental performances and territorial transformations linked to different development needs.The paper fits into this frame by proposing an analytical framework based on the ES multifunctionality approach, i.e., the joint provision of multiple ES, and applying it to the Italian national context. The methodology defines a spatial model based on three aggregate indices (abundance, diversity and richness) assessed considering the Provinces as reference territorial units. Derived from ecological disciplines, these three dimensions of ES multifunctionality describe the variability with which territorial units deliver multiple services for community well-being and support the analysis of the relationships between anthropic components of territorial systems and the ecosystems’ multifunctionality. The evaluation of how the three indices’ spatial distribution varied as a result of land use changes in the period 2000–2018 allows us to highlight specific aspects of territorial units useful to improve the knowledge framework from a sustainable planning perspective. The results highlight its potential to support decision-making processes and formulate recommendations for sustainable spatial plannin

RURAL INNOVATION, ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AND URBANISATION PROCESSES IN LIGURIA, BETWEEN COASTAL AND INNER AREAS

Exploiting environmental resources and urbanisation processes has significantly altered thenatural ecosystems over time, turning them into socio-ecological systems strongly affectedby anthropic settlements. Spatial planning must therefore aim at new development modelsable to harmonise the need to preserve the environmental components with the need toreduce the socio-economic inequalities, often linked to inequitable access to ecosystemservices. The case study of the Liguria Region is presented, with its marked polarisationbetween the linear coastal conurbation and inner areas, the areas providing the most sig-nificant number of ecosystem services and those with greater population and urbanisationdensity, which are instead organised as large demand poles. The paper analyses the rela-tionship between environmental values, in terms of ecosystem multifunctionality, and ruralinnovation forms that support territorial competitiveness. The aim is to explore how a sys-temic approach can integrate opportunities between the inner and coastal areas, qualifyingthe valley systems as new elements of the anthropic-environmental structure of the region

Innovazione rurale, servizi ecosistemici, e processi di urbanizzazione in Liguria, tra costa ed entroterra

The exploitation of environmental resources and urbanisation processes has significantly altered the natural ecosystems over time, turning them into socio-ecological systems strongly affected by anthropic settlements. Spatial planning must therefore aim at new development models able to harmonise the need to preserve the environmental components with the need to reduce the socio-economic inequalities, often linked to inequitable access to ecosystem services. The case study of the Liguria Region is presented, with its marked polarisation between the linear coastal conurbation and hinterland. This territorial structure is at the base of the relevant difference between the areas providing the most significant number of ecosystem services and those with greater population and urbanisation density, which are instead organised as large demand poles. This paper analyses the relationship between environmental values, in terms of ecosystem multifunctionality, and rural innovation forms that contribute to supporting territorial competitiveness. The aim is to explore how a systemic approach can facilitate integration opportunities between the inner and coastal areas, qualifying the valley systems as new elements of the anthropic-environmental structure of the region

Ecosystem services’ based impact assessment for low carbon transition processes

Low carbon transition represents one of the main challenges engaging territorial governments in a multiscale structure of planning and actions. The thematic focus on renewable energies sources (RES) development prevailed on an integrated approach to plan such relevant process in a more integrated and systemic view based on multiple territorial values estimation and the assessmen

Integrated approach of RUSLE, GIS and ESA Sentinel-2 satellite data for post-fire soil erosion assessment in Basilicata region (Southern Italy)

Fire effects consist not only in direct damage to the vegetation but also in the modification of both chemical and physical soil properties. Fire can affect the alteration of soil properties in different ways depending on fire severity and soil type. The most important consequences concern changes in soil responsiveness to the water action and the subsequent increase in sediment transport and erosion. Post fire soil loss can increase in the first year by several orders of magnitude compared to pre-fire erosion. In this study a distributed model based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) is used to estimate potential post-fire soil loss for four different fire events occurred in Basilicata region in 2017. Geographic Information System techniques and remote sensing data have been adopted to build a prediction model of post-fire soil erosion risk. Results show that this model is not only able to quantify post-fire soil loss but also to identify the complexity of the relationships between fire severity and all the factors that influence soil susceptibility to erosion

Ecosystem Services Multifunctionality: an analytical framework to support sustainable spatial planning. Insights from the Italian case study

At different levels of territorial governance, there is a growing need for tools to support policy making oriented towards sustainable planning. The Ecosystem Services (ES) methodological framework represents a structured dimension to develop tools for the assessment of environmental performances and for the evaluation of territorial transformations linked to development needs. In particular, we propose an analytical framework applied to the Italian National context based on the ES multifunctionality approach, to be intended as the opportunity to consider the joint provision of multiple ES. The results highlight its potential to support decision making processes and formulate recommendations for sustainable spatial planning

The provision of ecosystem services along the Italian coastal areas: a correlation analysis between environmental quality and urbanization

Over the course of its urban history, the Italian peninsula has seen an increasing concentration of population, economic activities and urbanization processes along its coastal areas. Many of Italy's large cities and main metropolitan areas are located along the coast or retain a strong and direct connection with it. In addition, in recent decades there has been growing anthropic pressure due to increasingly intense tourist activity. The aim of this work is to investigate the relationship between overall ecosystem services’ provision, assumed as a comprehensive measure of territorial environmental performances, and urbanization processes along the Italian coastal municipalities. The work started with the assessment of a selected set of ecosystem services successively combined into a synthetic index representative of the overall environmental values: the Multiple Ecosystem Services Landscape Index (MESLI). The intensity of this index was then correlated with several synthetic indicators (geographic, morphological, socio-economic and territorial indicators) descriptive of urbanization processes. The results show that more intensively urbanised areas are generally characterized by lower environmental performances. On the other hand, the variability of correlation ratios suggests that the settlement quality (shape, density...) plays an important role in depleting or protecting the overall ecosystem services provision. Equally relevant is the morphology of coastal strips, which evidently influences both settlements’ morphology and ecosystem services’ distribution and quality

Collaborative approach in strategic development planning for small municipalities. Applying geodesign methodology and tools for a new municipal strategy in Scanzano Jonico.

Facing urban development in weakest Italian municipalities is a critical technical activity which requires an integrated and inclusive approach for strategic goal selection together with effective monitoring tools describing local trends (concerning economy, services, employment, etc.) and local communities’ needs. The case study of Scanzano Jonico in Basilicata represents an interesting strategic planning laboratory due to the fact that the municipality is characterized by sensible territorial resources (mainly un-exploited), a developed agricultural system, a weak urban structure characterized by a generalized lack of effective public service, insufficient infrastructures. In a perspective of concrete and feasible strategic development planning, based on the lack of public resources and facing the challenge to guarantee better living conditions for local communities, the operative methodological framework of GEODESIGN was applied. A bottom up workshop oriented to identify a shared development scenario was performed including local relevant stakeholders. The paper presents territorial analyses represented in “systems” of suitability maps according with Geodesign Approach; then the results from the workshop are discussed in order to assess strengths and weaknesses of the application. The strategic design obtained through the participative workshop is characterized by a strict link with territorial features and local community ambitions and represents a “context-based” scenario suitable to implement regional cohesion policy main objectives