Ethiopian Civil Service University

College of Urban Development & Engineering

BLOCK – III

Urban Ecosystem and Basic Climate Change

Urban Social and Eco-systems

Week 11

December, 2017
 Objectives of the session

• To analyze the urban ecosystem services

• To assess the social production of ecosystem
services
• To evaluate the various type of environmental
injustice and ecological complexities

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 Ecosystem
• Ecosystems are defined by the network of
interactions

– among organisms, and

– between organisms and their environment,

• They can come in any size but usually encompass

specific, limited spaces (although some scientists
say that the entire planet is an ecosystem)
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 What are Urban Ecosystems?
• Urban ecosystems are dynamic ecosystems that
have similar interactions and behaviors as natural
ecosystems
• Unlike natural ecosystems, however, urban
ecosystems are:

– a hybrid of natural and man-made elements

whose interactions are affected not only by the
natural environment, but also culture, personal
behavior, politics, economics and social
organization.
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 Four Categories of Urban Ecosystem Services
Category Description
Provisioning services Products obtained from ecosystems like food,
fiber and energy

Regulating services Benefits from regulation of ecosystem processes

like pollination, seed dispersal, air and water
filtration

Cultural services Nonmaterial benefits from ecosystem like

spiritual enrichment, cognitive development,
recreation and aesthetic experiences
Supporting services Ecological functions such as nutrient cycling and
soil formation seen as necessary for the
production of all other ecosystem services

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 Urban Ecosystem services
Ecosystem services can address many of the challenges
that cities increasingly face, and the false dichotomy
between environment and development is nowhere as easy
to disprove as in cities.
Clean air, safe drinking water, and protection from climate
change effects are all highly relevant to human
development in cities, and many forms of poverty are
caused or exacerbated by a lack of access to these eco-
system services.
Interaction between built, social, human and natural
capital required to produce human well-being.
Built and human capital (the economy) are embedded in
society which is embedded in the rest of nature.
Ecosystem services are the relative contribution of natural
capital to human well-being, they do not flow directly.
It is therefore essential to adopt a broad, trans disciplinary
perspective in order to address ecosystem services.
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A Framework for Analyzing the Social Production of Ecosystem
Services
 If urban nature comes with benefits, there is almost
certainly an uneven social production of such ecosystem
services.
 So, there is a need to analyze the social production of
ecosystem services

 There are two interlinked modes of analysis;

- Spatial social–ecological network model - aimed
to gain a broader and citywide perspective on
generation and distribution;
- The second is for analyzing value articulation in
place-based struggles and urban planning
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 Spatial Socio-Ecological network analysis
• Under network viewpoint, an urbanized landscape can be
translated into an ecological network of interconnected nodes
of green and blue areas (or local ecosystem) surrounded by
built up areas.

• Linkages between nodes represent landscape ecological

connectivity, or flows, such as species movement, or the flows
of nutrients and water.

• Social features are folded into the network as attributes of the

nodes- each node carries with it a certain level of protective
capacity, and a certain level of management capacity.
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 Protective capacity means the ability to resist
exploitation.

 Protective capacity can be viewed as composed

of civic, public and technical processes
associated with particular green areas.

E.g., civic groups have played a great role

in shaping urban land use to include areas for
farming, parks, recreation and species
conservation
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Cont’d…
• Apart, many times, protective capacity is due
to biophysical constraints.

- For instance how steep hills, marshes or

wetlands make it difficult to build or for urban
exploitation.

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Cont’d…
• while management capacity – management
practices
• Aims to capture the ability to sustain landscape
ecological connectivity or flows through the specific
green areas.
• The day to day mgt practices of different actors
(planners, urban farmers, home owners) , embedded
in institutions and urban planning decisions,
influence individual green areas and their
vegetation cover,

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 ECOLOGICAL CONNECTIVITY

 Ecological connectivity stands for a passage

between the various green and natural areas
within the built areas or any plan where human
intervention is altering the natural landscape.

 The spaces between green areas, the built-up

environment, are not completely bank but
contribute to ecologically connectivity in
different ways.
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Ecological Connectivity

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 Value Articulation Processes
• focuses on the social practice of articulating value.
• No object or biophysical process carries inherent value,
and there in no innate order of value between objects-
values are constructed and hierarchized through social
processes, which can be empirically studied.

• This relates to protective and management capacity.

The protection of urban land is about whether to sustain
or keep a green area, while ecosystem management is
about choosing which ecosystem service to be
prioritize in certain spaces.

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For example it like deciding between the following, that
what should be prioritized? Alien species or indigenous
species; water ignorant land use or water-wise; mundane
recreational services for present users, or biodiversity as
insurance for future human generations?

Under this focus becomes on how actors, including and

scientists, with different and unequal abilities and
resources, participate in constructing values

 In order for something to be seen as having a value, there

need to be actors who can describe that something and
explain its value.

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Cont’d…
• These actors produce artifacts such as paintings, maps,
and scientific reports that can be used (by other actors) to
construct narratives able to describe a phenomenon, and
attach and explain its value.

• Such narratives, in turn, can be performed on social

arenas, especially media, public meetings, exhibitions, and
in parliament, that serves to circulate and eventually
establish, if successful, the value of a phenomenon.

• All these entities—actors, artifacts and social arenas—

forms part of value articulation

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 Environmental Justice and Ecological
Complexity
Environmental Justice …(can)… be achieved
when everyone enjoys:

1.the same degree of protection from

environmental and health hazards and
2.equal access to the decision-making process
to have a healthy environment in which to live,
learn, and work.
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Climate regulation, flood protection, pollination, fertile soils,
clean freshwater - the Earth’s ecosystems provide a large
variety of socially, economically and culturally valuable
services to humans (TEEB 2010).

Yet, humans degrade today’s ecosystems faster than ever and

cause the loss of important ecosystem services (MEA 2005:
26ff.). The harmful effects of diminishing ecosystem services
appear either as negative externalities, as in the case of
climate change or soil erosion, or as a loss of access to natural
resources, as in the case of fish, fertile land or fresh water.

Today’s poor, women and indigenous communities as well as

future generations are, respectively will be, disproportionately
affected by the negative externalities of ecosystem degradation
and by loss of access to essential ecosystem services (MEA
2005: 62).

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 Key Urban Environmental Justice Problems

Health Related Environmental Injustice

• There are innumerable proximal causes of urban environmental

disease.
• Cancer, respiratory illness, and heart disease abound in urban
areas, and it is a wonder that more do not succumb to the
chemicals and smells, the heat, the crowding, the stress, the time
pressures, and the crime.
• Given such universally low background levels of environmental
quality, low-income groups have strikingly higher incidences of
environmental disease than their urban counterparts.

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 The causes of such disease prevalence are numerous, but poorly
understood.

 Contributing factors may include:

1. poor outdoor air quality (specifically particulate matter, ozone, and
nitrogen oxides),
2. poor indoor air quality (stemming from indoor/kerosene space
heaters, poorly tuned gas stoves, and household pesticides and
toxics),
3. the disproportionate presence of allergens (cockroach eggs, dust, and
fumes from nearby industrial operations and/or dry cleaners), and
4. poor overall environmental conditions in dwelling units
(inadequate/sporadic heat, breeziness, the infiltration of secondary
smoke from other rooms/dwelling units).
 Perhaps more than any other environmental disease, the prevalence of
asthma reflects the diversity and magnitude of environmental risks
faced by people of low-income communities.

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 Spatial Environmental Injustice
• Most immediately, urban poor are forced to live nearer
to environmentally hazardous facilities.

• A number of studies have shown that urban poor

contain a disproportionate number of hazardous
facilities that more directly threaten their environmental
health, such as municipal sewage treatment plants,
incinerators, and large transportation facilities
(including diesel bus depots and garbage transfer
stations).

• Many inner-city ghettos are among the most inhuman

living environments ever designed and built.
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• In city after city, the most densely populated
neighborhoods are those occupied by the poor.

• These neighborhoods are not only unpleasant to live in,

they actively serve to enforce the oppression and
psychological imprisonment of their residents.

• They trap urban poor particularly youth, in the confines

of brick alleyways, litter-strewn lots, flooded back
streets and corners.

• For generations, the spatial arrangement of the city has

cut off effectively the social aspirations and economic
options of the most oppressed populations. 23
Structural/Economic Environmental Injustice
• Cities, as the economic engines of the global
economy, continue to have a voracious appetite for
labor and create a constant draw, across national
boundaries, of populations from rural areas to urban
areas.
• In most economies, this phenomenon does not
improve quality of life, but rather serves to continue
the devaluation of labor internationally.
• Because of massive immigrant influxes, urban land
abuses increase due to the increased need for housing
and educational and sanitary facilities.
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 Solutions
Better Policies to solve the existing living conditions of
urban poor and slum dwellers.
Slum rehabilitation plan
Providing affordable health plans to urban poor with the help
of international assistance.
Public Private partnership for improving the environmental
conditions
Consideration of concept of urban ecosystem services in
urban planning
Strongly enforcing the Environmental law and bylaws
Promoting Social Corporate responsibilities in cities to
ensure socio-environmental development along with
economic development
Strengthening and ensuring community planning.

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Thank You!

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