Francesc Baró

Vrije Universiteit Brussel | VUB · Department of Geography and Department of Sociology

Environmental values depend on social-ecological interactions and, in turn, influence the production of the underlying biophysical ecosystems. Understanding the nuanced nature of the values that humans ascribe to the environment is thus a key frontier for environmental science and planning. The development of many of these values depends on social-...

Introduction: Although cities globally are increasingly mobilizing re-naturing projects to address diverse urban socio-environmental and health challenges, there is mounting evidence that these interventions may also be linked to the phenomenon known as green gentrification. However, to date the empirical evidence on the relationship between greens...

As cities around the world are increasingly facing the impacts of climate change, a growing number of municipalities are leading collaborative projects to adapt schools to rising temperatures. The implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) is highlighted as an important component to be included in these initiatives given their multifunctional a...

Urban green and blue spaces (UGBS) are key for biodiversity conservation. Many studies focus on UGBS benefits for well-being, but how UGBS ecological and quality influence urban biodiversity is still poorly understood. We analysed the predictive accuracy of urban wildness (UW) and habitat quality (HQ) spatial patterns to biodiversity in the city of...

The understanding of urban social-ecological systems requires integrated and interdisciplinary methods. This paper explores differences in the accessibility of urban green spaces (UGS) based on urban morphology. In contrast to other comparative analyses that followed simplified quantification of UGS provision and/or omitted the impact of morphologi...

Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate-responsive cities, a growing literature on green gentrification argues that new green infrastructure, and greenspace in particular, can contribute to gentrification, thus creating social and racial inequalities in access to the benefits of greenspace a...

Sustainable urban and metropolitan planning is increasingly benefiting from differentiated assessments of ecosystem services. Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are particularly relevant for urban residents’ mental and physical health, yet, quantification and mapping of CES are often challenging, especially so in the Global South. The use of social...

Green or environmental gentrification has been shown to be directly related to residential physical and socio-cultural displacement and insecure housing conditions among socially or racially underprivileged residents, with clear related health impacts. In this context, those vulnerable groups become unable to benefit from the social, well-being, an...

Grassroots initiatives towards climate resilience in cities are likely to embed environmental education practices with potential transformative impact among young people. Through interviews and document review, we examine two initiatives involving different non-formal educational actions in Barcelona: a civic ecology practice based on the community...

Urban population and urbanisation are increasing rapidly, mainly in developing countries, usually at the expense of green and blue areas. This trend will decrease the ecosystems' capacity to supply ecosystem services (ES) and threaten human wellbeing. Therefore, it is key to establish greening policies in urbanising areas, which are essential to im...

Ecosystem services (ES) from urban green and blue infrastructure (GBI) provide cities and their citizens with benefits necessary to cope with present and future sustainability challenges. Long-term comprehensive urban greening strategies, policies, and plans are thus central to the development of sustainable, liveable, and resilient cities. However...

While nature-based solutions have become foundational to sustainable urban and landscape planning schemes at multiple landscape scales, there is a risk that previous progress in green-blue infrastructure planning will be reversed as cross-scale integration increases single- and small-scale focus on nature-based solutions which, in turn, impacts flo...

As global cities grapple with the increasing challenge of gentrification and displacement, research in public health and urban geography has presented growing evidence about the negative impacts of those unequal urban changes on the health of historically marginalized groups. Yet, to date comprehensive research about the variety of health impacts a...

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has mainstreamed as an interdisciplinary framework in the urban sustainability and resilience agenda. While the uptake of ES in urban areas is deeply entangled with multiple values, trade-offs, institutions, management and planning approaches, there is still a lack of a comprehensive and systematic framework t...

Spatial multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is increasingly being used to inform urban green infrastructure planning. We explore the use of modern cloud computing technologies (Google Earth Engine) to facilitate public access to spatial MCDA of ecosystem services from green infrastructure. Using the spatial prioritization of green roof retrofit...

The structural research programmes of the European Union dedicated to advance the sustainability sciences are increasingly permeated by the notion of transdisciplinarity (TD). A growing body of literature residing at the intersection of research methodology and sustainability studies can guide researchers to adopt appropriate research approaches in...

Background To control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, countries around the world implemented lockdowns with varying intensities. Lockdowns, however, have been associated with a deterioration of mental health, including post-traumatic stress symptoms, anger and anxiety. Exposure to nature might reduce stress and provide relaxation opportunities....

On the one hand the Special Issue provides a diagnosis of the justice implications embedded in recent efforts to renature cities. Placed in the breadth of existing scholarship, it aims to explore the type of socio-environmental contradictions and contestations emerging through the deployment of nature-based solutions in a range of geographies. On t...

Urban outdoor play spaces are reported to improve children's health. However, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of outdoor play spaces on childhood mental and behavioral health. To fill this gap, we investigated the associations between residential proximity to outdoor play spaces and the prevalence of diagnosed mental and behavioral...

This report is the main outcome of Task 2.1 of work package 2 (WP2). Overall, this WP aims to analyze and compare the implementation of UF-NBS in selected cities and city regions in view of their impacts on urban ecosystems and societies, their cost effectiveness, and their replicability in distinct contents. In this context, Task 2.1 consisted of...

A mounting body of research shows strong positive associations between urban nature and child well-being, including benefits related to mental and physical health. However, there is also evidence that children are spending less time in natural environments than previous generations, especially those living in deprived neighborhoods. To date, most s...

In recent years, the notion of urban resilience has permeated the responses of Spanish cities to the risks and effects of climate change, either through various municipal adaptation plans and/or the mitigation of climate change, or more general public policies such as development or civil protection plans. At the same time, citizens are organizing...

The effective integration of biodiversity, ecosystem functions and ecosystem services (ES) indicators into green infrastructure (GI) planning and conservation constitutes an important challenge for landscape and urban planners. In this study, we developed an operational framework for GI planning at the landscape scale in the Province of Barcelona....

Planetary urbanization exacerbates the spread of infectious disease and the emergence of pandemics. As COVID-19 cases continue to swell in cities around the world, the pandemic has visibilized urban health inequities. In the Global North, emerging trends show that lower income residents are often at greater risk for infection and death due to COVID...

The end of the first working program of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provided an opportunity to draw lessons from its work. This perspective paper captures insights from ecosystem services (ES) researchers and practitioners, largely drawing from the Europeancontext (referred to herein...

Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries...

‘Nature-based solutions’ is the new jargon used to promote ideas of urban sustainability, which is gaining traction in both academic and policy circles, especially in the European Union. Through an analysis of the definitions and discourse around nature-based solutions, we discern a number of assumptions stemming from positivist science that are em...

Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines th...

As cities face increasing pressure from densification trends, green roofs represent a valuable source of ecosystem services for residents of compact metropolises where available green space is scarce. However, to date little research has been conducted regarding the holistic benefits of green roofs at a citywide scale, with local policymakers lacki...

The ecosystem service (ES) literature has been criticized for adopting a homogenous approach to communities and failing to consider social diversity, power structures influencing access to nature’s benefits, and participation in the planning and management of ES. Still, despite the growing body of literature on ES, considerations of environmental j...

Street trees are an important component of green infrastructure in cities, providing multiple ecosystem services (ES) and hence contributing to urban resilience, sustainability and livability. Still, access to these benefits may display an uneven distribution across the urban fabric, potentially leading to socio-environmental inequalities. Some stu...

Social-ecological systems in the Mediterranean Basin are characterised by high biodiversity and a prolonged cultural influence, leading to the co-evolution of these systems. The unique characteristics of Mediterranean social-ecological systems, current pressures leading to a decline in ecosystem services, and the need for coordinated action are rec...

The circumstances under which different ecosystem service benefits can be realised differ. Benefits tend to be co-produced and enabled by multiple interacting social, ecological, and technological factors, which is particularly evident in cities. As many cities are undergoing rapid change, these factors need to be better understood and accounted fo...

The ecosystem services concept is increasingly gaining momentum in land-use policies and landscape planning. Yet, cultural ecosystem services often lack proper assessments. With this study, we use novel methodological approaches to map the cultural ecosystem service landscape aesthetics for its enhanced consideration in land-use policies. Our study...

This book is a beginning. It is the beginning of a series of publications on the urban greening policy trajectories of 99 European and North American mid-sized cities over roughly a 25-year period (beginning in 1990). These publications will examine in-depth the social equity implications of developing new urban green spaces and bringing nature bac...

Urbanization is an important driver of changes in land cover in the Mediterranean Basin and it is likely to impact the supply and demand of ecosystem services (ES). The most significant land cover changes occur in the periurban zone, but little is known about how these changes affect the ES supply. For eight European and four North African cities,...

The ecosystem service (ES) concept is becoming mainstream in policy and planning, but operational influence on practice is seldom reported. Here, we report the practitioners' perspectives on the practical implementation of the ES concept in 27 case studies. A standardised anonymous survey (n=246), was used, focusing on the science-practice interact...

The Ecosystem Services (ES) concept highlights the varied contributions the environment provides to humans and there are a wide range of methods/tools available to assess ES. However, in real-world decision contexts a single tool is rarely sufficient and methods must be combined to meet practitioner needs. Here, results from the OpenNESS project ar...

The operational challenges of integrated ecosystem service (ES) appraisals are determined by study purpose, system complexity and uncertainty, decision-makers' requirements for reliability and accuracy of methods, and approaches to stakeholder-science interaction in different decision contexts. To explore these factors we defined an information gap...

Aquesta memòria tècnica desenvolupa i cartografia indicadors de biodiversitat, funcions i serveis ecosistèmics de la Província de Barcelona. Desenvolupa una diagnosi de la multi-funcionalitat del territori i proposa un model d'Infraestructura Verda (IV) de la Província de Barcelona. Analitza aquest model d'IV en relació de la planificació territori...

As the ecosystem service concept has become more widely recognised, so the number of biophysical, socio-cultural and monetary methods available to assess ecosystem services has increased. There is relatively little guidance on how to select and combine these methods into hybrid approaches that address policy purposes. Based on experiences from 27 c...

Ecosystem service (ES) spatial modelling is a key component of the integrated assessments designed to support policies and management practices aiming at environmental sustainability. ESTIMAP ("Ecosystem Service Mapping Tool") is a collection of spatially explicit models, originally developed to support policies at a European scale. We based our an...

Spatial planning has to deal with trade-offs between various stakeholders’ wishes and needs as part of planning and management of landscapes, natural resources and/or biodiversity. To make ecosystem services (ES) trade-off research more relevant for spatial planning, we propose an analytical framework, which puts stakeholders, their land-use/manage...

More information here: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/barcelonallibres/ca/publicacions/atles-dels-ocells-nidificants-de-barcelona

Mounting research assesses the provision of regulating ecosystem services by green infrastructure in urban areas, but the extent to which these services can offer effective nature-based solutions for addressing urban climate change-related challenges is rarely considered. In this chapter, we synthesize knowledge from assessments of urban green infr...

The promise that ecosystem service assessments will contribute to better decision-making is not yet proven. We analyse how knowledge on ecosystem services is actually used to inform land and water management in 22 case studies covering different social-ecological systems in European and Latin American countries. None of the case studies reported in...

Greening cities, namely installing new parks, rooftop gardens or planting trees along the streets, undoubtedly contributes to an increase in wellbeing and enhances the attractiveness of open spaces in cities. At the same time, we observe an increasing use of greening strategies as ingredients of urban renewal, upgrading and urban revitalization as...

A key challenge of landscape planning and management is coping with multiple ecosystem service (ES) potentials and needs in complex social-ecological systems such as urban regions. However, few studies have analyzed both the supply and demand sides of ES bundles, i.e., sets of associated ES that repeatedly appear together across time or space. This...

Ecosystem services (ES) mapping is attracting growing interest from landscape and urban planning, but its operationalization in actual decision-making is still limited. A clear distinction between ES capacity, flow and demand can improve the usefulness of ES mapping as a decision-support tool by informing planners and policy-makers where ES are use...

In an increasingly urban planet, many cities and their inhabitants are facing multiple pressing threats within their borders, including heat stress, pollution and growing disconnection with the biosphere. Improving sustainability, resilience and livability in urban areas should be thus a major goal on the policy agenda, from local to global authori...

The mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services in EU - MAES - is an initiative of the European Commission, which aims to improve the knowledge and evidence base for biodiversity policy as defined under Target 2 Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. The fourth MAES report provides guidance for mapping and assessing urban eco...

Understanding the dynamics of urban ecosystem services is a necessary requirement for adequate planning, management, and governance of urban green infrastructure. Through the three-year Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (URBES) research project, we conducted case study and comparative research on urban biodiversity and ecosystem services ac...

Regulating ecosystem services (RES) such as climate regulation, air quality regulation or runoff mitigation can play a major role in enhancing human well-being and quality of life in urban areas. However, RES are often overlooked in urban decision making because their impact on human well-being can be difficult to measure, which causes a lack of re...

Most cities are not self-sufficient in terms of supply and demand of urban ecosystem services (UES) which creates important social, economic and environmental problems at different scales. Cities have enormous potential to reduce pressures on the environment while enhancing wellbeing for their inhabitants by acting both on the UES supply and demand...

The concept of " Green Infrastructure " (GI) is gaining political momentum and has been rapidly introduced in both planning theory and policy, especially in US and Europe (see Lennon, 2014). Yet, it does not have a single widely recognised or accepted definition (Wright, 2011). The term has been adopted by various disciplines (e.g., land conservati...

The concept of " Green Infrastructure " (GI) is gaining political momentum and has been rapidly introduced in both planning theory and policy, especially in US and Europe (see Lennon, 2014). Yet, it does not have a single widely recognised or accepted definition (Wright, 2011). The term has been adopted by various disciplines (e.g., land conservati...