The impact of projected increases in urbanization on ecosystem services

TLDR

Land‑use change, driven mainly by European urbanization, is expected to alter the spatial distribution of ecosystem services and their beneficiaries before 2050, but the net outcome remains uncertain. The study models projected urban land‑cover changes in Britain under a 16 % population increase by 2031 to assess impacts on flood mitigation, agricultural production, and carbon storage. Using spatially explicit land‑cover projections for Britain, the authors evaluate effects on flood mitigation, agricultural production, and carbon storage. The model predicts that densification will increase peak river flows, affecting 1.7 million people within 1 km of rivers, while sprawl has little impact on flood mitigation but causes more than threefold greater losses in stored carbon and agricultural production, highlighting the difficulty of forecasting ecosystem service demands amid urban growth.

Abstract

Alteration in land use is likely to be a major driver of changes in the distribution of ecosystem services before 2050. In Europe, urbanization will probably be the main cause of land-use change. This increase in urbanization will result in spatial shifts in both supplies of ecosystem services and the beneficiaries of those services; the net outcome of such shifts remains to be determined. Here, we model changes in urban land cover in Britain based on large (16%) projected increases in the human population by 2031, and the consequences for three different services—flood mitigation, agricultural production and carbon storage. We show that under a scenario of densification of urban areas, the combined effect of increasing population and loss of permeable surfaces is likely to result in 1.7 million people living within 1 km of rivers with at least 10 per cent increases in projected peak flows, but that increasing suburban ‘sprawl’ will have little effect on flood mitigation services. Conversely, losses of stored carbon and agricultural production are over three times as high under the sprawl as under the ‘densification’ urban growth scenarios. Our results illustrate the challenges of meeting, but also of predicting, future demands and patterns of ecosystem services in the face of increasing urbanization.