An Ecosystem Services-Based Territorial Ranking for Italian Provinces

Cities’ Rankings are increasingly used to compare territorial performances related to different dimensions of well-being or territorial development. In the context of urban and territorial planning, they often contribute to legitimizing governance processes and have a marked influence on the evaluation of the policies’ success. Therefore, even if those analytical practices cannot be considered as robust tools, they express a great potential in terms of communication capacity and as an awareness raising tool. The aim of this work is to combine the concept of ranking with the methodological framework of Ecosystem Services (ES), considered a reference in the evaluation of urban and territorial development components towards sustainability. Based on a spatially explicit assessment of a relevant set of ES, the Multiple Ecosystem Services Landscape Index (MESLI) was assessed for the Italian national territory. The resulting spatial distributed layer was subsequently aggregated in order to obtain a ranking of Italian territories based on the concept of ecosystem multifunctionality. The results show an unexpected representation of the environmental performance of the territorial units, which are markedly affected by the reciprocal relationships between environmental and anthropic components of the territorial system. The conclusions highlight the potential of this synthetic indicator that provides valid arguments for the public debate about sustainability and ecosystem multifunctionality driving the attention of decision makers and citizens on the role of ESs’ value in strategic planning and development. The aims are to stimulate a debate concerning environmental performances and to contribute in increasing the non-experts demand for sustainability in the territorial governance processes.