Integrated process of Ecosystem Services evaluation and urban planning. The experience of LIFE SAM4CP project towards sustainable and smart communities

Evaluation of Ecosystem Services (ES) and related mapping tools and techniques can be used in urban planning and design to define sustainable land use strategies aimed to achieve resilience in urban planning. The analysis of ES improves the ability of politicians, administrators, planners and stakeholders to define strategies of regeneration, ecologically and energy efficient oriented. Furthermore, it allows reflecting about the sustainability of urbanisation and related environmental issues, bringing attention to social and economic aspects, too. The soil, as measurable value common good, is a source of energy, requires a strong reduction of its consumption and a good use of it. The paper experienced the recent research innovations made by DIST for LIFE program SAM4CP, which integrates the process of planning and decision making with analysis and assessments of ES in order to support Municipalities to define policies and monitoring procedures oriented to limit the consumption of high quality soil. The process of evaluation and planning can also be adopted for urban resilient projects aimed at define successful methods for improving energy efficiency in communities and urban areas. The paper aims to present partial results of the project. A strong integration of evaluation and planning actions, providing multicriteria analysis techniques and adopting software (like InVEST) able to map the outcomes of the evaluation process and the inputs for the planning process will be discussed. An indicator based approach is presented as the innovative tool to achieve land use efficiency, and resilience as the main paradigm to steer Co-planning Conference.