Identifying and enhancing socioeconomic value of Integrated Urban Services

All over the World large and medium-sized cities formulate ambitions and implement plans to create smart, sustainable, and climate resilient urban environments. These plans are needed to manage risks in urban areas where hazardous events can cause a series of interlocking systems to fail. To support these plans Integrated Urban Services (IUS) are being developed. IUS is driven both by the growing capabilities of NHMSs to develop and provide such services and by the growing needs of urban decision makers to adequately anticipate these hazards and their impacts on cities and to improve short-term and long-term resilience. To implement IUS cities must invest in diverse observation and modelling options to monitor and evaluate their response to changes in the climate (including extreme events) and urban landscape.

Notwithstanding the large potential to contribute to sustainability goals of cities the realization of broad scoped truly integrated urban services could be faster than its current pace of development. In this context it is expected that the ability to better demonstrate the value potential of IUS and the extra benefits of further developing and coordinating different services would help to precipitate uptake and expansion of IUS. To this end, the WMO Study Group on Integrated Urban Services has produced several guidelines to help NHMSs to create IUS in cooperation city authorities. This Study Group also received expert support to better describe the benefit potential, mechanisms behind benefit generation, and ways to assess the net benefits of IUS. The approach hinges on the value chain concept.

The presentation will show how the value chain can explain and analyse the diversity in organizational and service structure of IUS. The presentation will also illustrate how the value chain can be used to quantify value generation and how that approach can also be used to review what segments in current service practice seem to offer the prospect for the most notable improvements. Assessed service cases are as such hypothetical yet based on real world information and on indications from the literature on key parameters.