Ecosystem Services Approach for Landscaping Project: The Case of Metropolia Residential Complex

Redevelopment of former industrial areas provides a great opportunity to consider the ecosystem services assessment in urban planning to improve sustainability of major cities worldwide as urban green infrastructure provides wide range of regulatory and supporting services. However, most of the landscaping projects in Russia does not use this approach due to both the lack of legislations and low level of interactions between science and practitioners. To meet this challenge an eco-hackathon (competition between projects) was organized to demonstrate the possibilities of using the ecosystem services concept to evaluate the effectiveness of project solutions. An existing landscaping project was chosen as a good example to assess several basic benefits that people will achieve from soils and green infrastructure after redevelopment of the industrial area in Moscow. We used the report on engineering and environmental surveys, a plan of landscaping and other support data from project architects (landscape bureau UTRO) to calculate carbon sequestration by biomass and soils, water transpiration and infiltration, air purification and climate regulation. Estimations and modeling were performed with ENVI-MET, HYDRUS software and i-TreeEco model. Our results showed after project implementation, the created ecosystems will absorb one kilogram of PM10 per year, transpire 200–300 thousand liters of water, accumulate 720–1000 kg of carbon, and perform up to one billion kWh work on reducing thermal stress on 10%. Based on our results we provided some recommendations to improve the project quality in terms of better ecosystem services provisioning and sustainable functioning. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.