Ecosystem Services Supply from Peri-Urban Landscapes and Their Contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals: A Global Perspective

Abstract

Peri-urban landscapes (PULs) play an important role in the supply of ecosystem services (ES), which support development and well-being in urban and rural areas. Understanding the impacts of policy actions on the supply of ES and how they might contribute to the achievement of a range of sustainable development goals (SDG) is a key challenge, especially for spatial planning. The aim of this article is to explore the links between the ES supply from PULs and how they support different SDGs from a global perspective. For this, we implemented a review of the literature oriented to identify (1) the most relevant ES provided by PULs at a global level, (2) how they support the achievement of different SDG, and (3) the type of policy interventions and actors related to PULs. We identified the supply of 17 different ES by PULs and a relationship to 12 SDGs. In 58% of the cases, the SDGs were related to two ES sections, where regulation and maintenance was dominant. Pure research was the main type of intervention, mainly at the municipal scale. Increasing the cooperation between science and policy and expanding the scale of analysis beyond municipal boundaries are critical aspects.

Keywords

• peri-urban landscape
• ecosystem services
• sustainable development goals
• governance
• spatial planning