An evaluation of flood control and urban cooling ecosystem services delivered by urban green infrastructure

Abstract

To inform planning decisions and address climate change impacts in expanding cities, it is desirable to quantify urban ecosystem services like flood control and urban cooling. By comparing with a purpose-built habitat map, this study ground-truthed a method to assess flood control, which was developed by Southampton City Council from surface maps. It was confirmed that infiltration capacity is a good proxy for flood control, leaf area index could represent urban cooling, and thereby both could be used to score urban surface types. A two-tiered system was proposed so that surface maps would be used for city-wide scale, and as they produce similar results that are more accurate at fine scales, habitat maps are used at site level. These surrogates were integrated to produce a Green Space Factor for flood control and urban cooling, wherein a combined score can be generated for particular locations. This could be extended further to include other ecosystem services. The new integrated multi-scale ecosystem service quantification tool could be used by developers and policy-makers to identify target areas in their projects and policies that could benefit from enhanced green infrastructure.