Using nature to solve urban sustainability and equity challenges

By 2050, 75 percent of the world population will live in cities. It has become increasingly important to consider how urban nature – city parks, gardens, and natural or “green” infrastructure – can influence quality of life and climate resilience and mitigation, and how equitably these benefits are distributed. 

Enter the Natural Capital Project (NatCap)’s new prototype web application for San Antonio, Texas, Urban Online. Urban Online automates the process of using InVEST, NatCap’s suite of free, open-source ecosystem services modeling tools, through an intuitive, web-based user interface and visualizations. While InVEST is already used in nearly every country in the world to assess alternative management choices and identify areas where investment in nature may provide the greatest benefits, Urban Online allows a whole new group of users to take direct advantage of it, and saves them hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that might be spent hiring experts to collect data and run the models. 

In this pilot version, Urban Online provides the city of San Antonio with the ability to easily compare different land-use and land-change scenarios for their impacts on climate change mitigation, urban cooling, and access to nature, including how these impacts are distributed across communities. NatCap hopes to expand this tool to additional cities and ecosystem services before developing it into a national, and eventually global, offering. 

“In addition to making it easier to use, the Urban Online tool builds on years of NatCap partners' work to improve Urban InVEST's relevance to decision-makers, by aligning land-use classes and tree-canopy data with zoning decisions, incorporating parcel data for planning, and socio-economic data for equity and justice considerations,” said Eric Lonsdorf, NatCap senior fellow and assistant professor of environmental sciences at Emory University, formerly with the University of Minnesota-based NatCap team and now a co-founder of NatCap Insights, a new consulting group. 

What’s new about Urban Online?

InVEST requires significant expertise and training to use: it involves using geographic information systems (GIS) and computer modeling, including finding and preparing the relevant landscape, climate, and socioeconomic datasets to feed into the models. 

Now, for San Antonio – and eventually elsewhere – people without any training in modeling scenarios, such as city planners, community leaders, or other landowners or land managers, can select an area of interest and change its land use – say, from an industrial area to a city park, or a golf course to a public garden – and compare the resulting changes in benefits for specific communities. Currently, the benefits it includes are carbon sequestration, urban cooling, and access to nature, as these were of interest to local partners during the tool’s development process, but this could expand to include other urban ecosystem services in the future. 

NatCap partners at the University of Minnesota, NatCap Insights, and Stanford University obtained funding from NASA’s Earth Science Applications: Equity and Environmental Justice Program to co-create the tool with decision-makers in San Antonio in order to maximize its usefulness in supporting equitable green infrastructure investment decisions. Now, the team is interested in understanding how strong and widespread the interest is in this approach.

“We're really trying to meet urban planners and stakeholders where they are,” said Dave Fisher, software engineer at NatCap. “Not everyone has the expertise or staff to use traditional GIS and modeling tools to get the information they need. With this web app, we're doing the tedious parts of modeling behind the scenes to let planners spend more time exploring scenarios that are meaningful to them.”

In this pilot version, the landing page focuses on urban heat and its socioeconomic dimensions – showing areas where it is particularly hot, and where there are high concentrations of low-income communities or communities of color. This provides context for where these issues are most significant. For example, places that are relatively cool and relatively wealthy are likely not the highest priority places to invest in green infrastructure (for example, trees and parks that provide urban cooling and other benefits). 

A vision to expand beyond the prototype

With this new tool, community leaders and others in San Antonio can assess the likely benefits of land use changes to help make or advocate for decisions about where to invest in nature for the biggest and most equitable returns. While this version of Urban Online is for just one city, the aim is to build this for additional U.S. cities, and then at the national level and beyond. Regions with common datasets such as European Union countries could be relatively easy places to expand this to. 

“Our hope is that these ‘what if’ scenarios can help change people’s ways of thinking about what is possible in their city, and open up new paths toward greater sustainability and equity,” said Guerry. 

Urban Online offers an early glimpse into the future of InVEST more generally. NatCap is currently working to make InVEST more accessible to non-technical users and its outputs easier for decision-makers to readily take up and use – through web-based interfaces similar to Urban Online, a new global data hub, standardized visualizations, and other innovations. The Natural Capital World Viewer already available on the NatCap website is another early prototype showing the direction these tools are going in, providing global data on clean water, nature access, and coastal protection in an easy-to-explore format. 

The Natural Capital Project is based out of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and its Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. Its core partners include the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the University of Minnesota, TNC, and WWF.