Enhancing Sustainable Urban Development through Ecosystem Services - ENSURE

ENSURE contributes to a revised conceptualisation of sustainable urban development by better integration of ecosystem services into the urban planning paradigm by filling the gap between natural and social science approaches.
The above objective is pursued as a well integrated set of five work packages by:
* quantifying certain key regulating, supporting and provisioning services by measuring the impact of urban green on water quality, flood control, urban air quality, and biodiversity (WP1, leader Professor Heikki Setälä).
* creating relevant knowledge about young and elderly people’s understanding, attitudes and values concerning the urban environment and the role of ecosystem services as part of it (WP2, leader Professor Sirpa Tani).
* evaluating the economic significance of ecosystem services, taking into account resilience to climate change (WP3, leaders Professor Adriaan Perrels and Professor Heikki Setälä).
* investigating the role of social, ecological and spatial scales in urban sustainability, the governance challenges they bring to land use, and opportunities to overcome these (WP4, leader Harry Schulman).
* transdisciplinary research and outreach activities (WP5, leader Dr. Outi Salminen).

Principal investigator of the project: Dr. Susanna Lehvävirta