Ecosystem Amenities as Drivers for Urban Development and its Resulting Impacts: A Social-Ecological Modeling Approach for Stockholm, Sweden

A comprehensive understanding and modeling of socio-ecological systems can better assess the interactions between ecosystem amenities and human urban development. Based on the theory of supply-demand of ecosystem service, this paper constructs a comprehensive socio-ecological system modeling approach to identify ecosystem amenities’ roles in shaping human urban development and how the developments in turn affect ecosystem services. In our model, ecosystem services are regarded as both attractors and costs to human activities that cause urban land use changes. It adds to the existing ecosystem impact assessment approaches by integrating ecosystem services as both supply and demand in a socio-ecological process model with dynamic interaction and feedback between social and ecological systems. The approach couples socioeconomic, urban land use, and ecosystem interactions in a fine scaled (30×30 m) modeling framework with multiple time steps and feedback. Calibration through machine-learning techniques is applied to depict the joint driving forces from ecosystem amenities, socioeconomic attractors, and biophysical factors in influencing urban land use developments. Ecosystem Preservation District policy is tested as a policy scenario that aims to protect high-value ecosystem service areas while ensuring maximum ecosystem amenity provisions to urban inhabitants. Stockholm County, Sweden constitutes the study area with forecasts to 2040.

The analytical results will include: 1) calibrated functional forms and variable coefficients of ecosystem amenities that drive urban developments in comparison to other socioeconomic and biophysical variables; 2) assessment of ecosystem service value losses induced by human development; and 3) simulation of ecosystem service value preserved through Ecosystem Preservation District policy scenario. The analytical evidence provides further proof-of-concept of superior capability of using comprehensive socio-ecological models of understanding interactions between human and ecological systems. The policy scenario analysis offers supporting evidence for mitigating environmental impacts from urban growth through growth management policies. Finally, optimization of supply-demand of ecosystem services is critical in constituting the toolkit for nature-based solutions in urban planning and management.