Land use in Helsinki, Finland, as based on the Urban Atlas 2018 of the European Environment Agency.

By Jussi Lampinen, Oriol García-Antúnez, Joel Jalkanen, Minttu Havu, Anton Stahl
Olafsson, Natalie M. Gulsrud, and Christopher M. Raymond.

Read the full paper here.

In a study conducted in Helsinki, Finland, we found that urban green areas that differ in their biodiversity and carbon flow tend to host somewhat different types of social values, such as the recreation possibilities that green areas provide, the beautiful scenery they contribute to, or the cultural heritage that they support. For example, values of wildness were most likely to occur in green areas with high biodiversity and strong carbon sink capacity, while values of sports were most likely to occur in green areas with more intermediate biodiversity and those that act as both sinks and sources of carbon.

We also found that places in Helsinki that score highest in biodiversity, carbon flow, or social values, overlap spatially only moderately. In other words, places in Helsinki most important for the three data types are situated in partly different places across the cityscape. The exception to this were large forested green areas that scored high in both biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and social values. To complicate matters more, we also found that different people in the city were likely to value green areas for different reasons. Women, for example, were more likely than men to value green areas for the restorative and relaxing experiences that they provide.

Our results suggest that the synergies and trade-offs – or the wins and the losses – between managing urban green areas for social values, biodiversity, or carbon flow are unlikely to be universal, but rather to differ between different types of values and across different urban contexts. This means that policy aiming to manage green areas to protect biodiversity or to safeguard carbon stocks is likely to result in a diversity of consequences for different ways of valuing green areas. We argue that aiming for synergies and avoiding trade-offs between social values, biodiversity, and carbon flow in green areas is best achieved with participatory planning processes that acknowledge and assess different social values, as well as ecological values, for green areas in cities.