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.