You win some, you lose some - compensating the loss of green space in cities taking heterogeneous population characteristics into consideration

Jonas Nordström and Cecilia Hammarlund ()
Additional contact information
Cecilia Hammarlund: AgriFood economics centre, Postal: AgriFood Economics Centre , Box 730 , Scheelevägen 15 D, 220 07 LUND, Sweden, https://www.agrifood.se/staffDetail.aspx?fKeyID=15

No 2021:3, AgriFood-WP from Lund University, AgriFood Economics Centre

Abstract: The increased urbanization and human population growth of recent decades have resulted in the loss of urban green spaces. One policy used to prevent the loss of urban green space is ecological compensation. Ecological compensation is the final step in the mitigation hierarchy; compensation measures should thus be a last resort, after all opportunities to implement the earlier steps of the hierarchy have been exhausted. The compensation should balance the ecological damage, aiming for a “no net loss” of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In this study, we develop a simple model that can be used as tool to study the welfare effects of applying ecological compensation when green space is at risk of being exploited, both at an aggregate level for society and for different groups of individuals. Our focus is on urban green space and the value of the ecosystem service – recreation – that urban green space provides. In a case study we show how the model can be used in the planning process to evaluate the welfare effects of compensation measures at various sites within the city. The results from the case study indicate that factors such as population density and proximity to green space have a large impact on aggregate welfare from green space and on net welfare when different compensation sites are compared against each other.

Keywords: Urban green space; Ecological compensation; Recreational value; Wellbeing; Utility; Welfare effects; Distributional effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 Q26 Q50 Q57 R52 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2021-08-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-isf, nep-upt and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.agrifood.se/Files/AgriFood_WP20213.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:luagri:2021_003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AgriFood-WP from Lund University, AgriFood Economics Centre AgriFood Economics Centre, Box 730, Scheelevägen 15 D, 220 07 LUND, Sweden.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kristian Sundström ().