Ecosystem Services Assessment Methods for Integrated Processes of Urban Planning. The Experience of LIFE SAM4CP Towards Sustainable and Smart Communities

Evaluation of Ecosystem Services (ES) supports the knowledge and the ability of politicians, administrators, planners and stakeholders to define urban regeneration strategies rather than sustainable spatial planning and design practices responding to climate change conditions and addressing the wellbeing of local communities. The analysis of ES allows for the study of the relationship between urban morphology and land cover/land use to define priorities that maximize the ability of urban systems to deliver multiple benefits (e.g.to store carbon and improve air quality).The recent research innovations made by DIST – Politecnico di Torino for LIFE + Program SAM4CP (2014-2018), moves towards the implementation of a theoretical and practical framework that integrates the process of planning and decision making with the analysis and assessments of ES. The framework has been conceived to support Municipalities to settle policies and monitoring procedures oriented at defining Nature-Based solutions (e.g. restoration strategies) assuming an urban ecology perspective. The project aims at providing a digital tool - a Simulator delivered to Local authorities– to evaluate the ES assessment in different land use scenarios to determine the environmental and economic costs, or benefits, that arise from alternative planning configurations. The evaluation of ES in a case of study area shows that the effective integration of ES evaluation and planning actions is a straightforward method that create awareness and increase the sustainability during decision-making phases for the planning process. The Simulator is available for free on the project website - www.sam4cp.eu - to allow administrators and public officials, as well as spatial planners, interested in such a kind of evaluation, to experiment and apply this methodology.