URBNANCE Blog

Appreciation: How can we better recognize and consider the diverse values of nature in the city?

Financial valuation for nature in the city?

The New York Times published an article last year that ut forward the following idea: ‘How about signing a long-term lease with a company that values your property for the same reasons you do: long walks through tall grass, the calls of migratory birds, keeping the air and water clean.’

A vacant plot of land in the city or at least in the immediate vicinity of a city is to be leased to a company. But not as usual, to create parking spaces or storage areas for machines or building materials. Instead, the intention is to guarantee that urban nature is preserved. Plants, people and other living beings should continue to use the site and be able to strengthen and perhaps even expand their relationships. That added value should be monetised in a rent that allows the company to make investments at the same time. When I first read the article, I couldn't appreciate the idea much - is this the future I want? There are ultimately critical questions surrounding the idea of leasing an urban natural space. Can the value of relationships be monetised? Who gets access and is allowed to use the area after the investment? What happens if a company is given the right to decide on these matters? The risk of the company losing interest in the space cannot be denied. That could be simply because the investment in the lease is no longer worthwhile.

Only at the second glance I realised that the idea also holds great potential. Indeed, the proposal highlights the diversity of urban human-nature relationships: urban nature is more than just a property or a resource provider. The additional value is not only justified by the instrumental use of urban nature for people. The calls of migratory birds and the long walks create an idea in which urban nature represents something like a space for living and experiencing. It may even create a significant resonating space that is valued for various motivational reasons.

Diverse perspectives on our relationship with nature

The International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently shed light on precisely this diversity of perspectives with which we humans value our relationships with nature and bring them to life (IPBES 2022). The report summarises the global richness of human-nature relationships in four types of ‘life frames of values’: Living from, with, in or as nature (see infobox). These types do not mutually exclude each other. Moreover, there can also be mixed forms that are expressed together in different contexts. To better understand individual and collective value judgements, those life frames can help us to shape them in a more just way in the future.

Infobox: Life frame of values

Living from nature: We can emphasise nature's ability to provide resources for sustenance, needs and desires.

Living with nature: We can underline the importance of life-sustaining processes in context with non-human beings.

Living in nature: We can refer to the importance of natural spaces as environments for people's lives, behaviour and culture.

Living as nature: We can perceive nature as a physical, mental and spiritual part of ourselves.

Instrumental values are related to the importance of nature to achieve human goals or satisfy human needs. Being a means to an end, instrumental values are replaceable, although in reality this is not always the case.

Intrinsic values refer to the importance of nature for its own sake, regardless of its usefulness to humans, e.g. certain living beings, natural processes or landscapes are worth protecting as ends in themselves.

Relational values describe desirable, meaningful and reciprocal relationships between humans and nature, which often exist in relation to a particular landscape or living being. These are not interchangeable and lose their meaning if they are perceived as purely instrumental values.

How can the diverse perspectives be brought to life?

How do these conclusions translate to the example of the vacant plot in New York? Can these life frames help us to better recognise the values of nature? I should give it a try and see if they can help me to broaden my view of the diverse values of nature. In general, there is hope that human-nature relationships can keep thriving on the site. But what happens if people continue to have access, how could they bring their diverse views of nature to life?

Living from nature initially draws my attention to human needs, such as fresh air, clean drinking water and recreation, which can be provided as resources by the meadow. Living in nature makes me realise how valuable the long walks in the tall grass are, enabling people to relax and create more-than-human contacts. From the perspective of living with nature, I realise the power of urban nature to keep the water and air clean and to enable life. It also allows city dwellers to engage directly with plants and animals. They can listen to the calls of migratory birds, for example, and the birds can fulfil their need for communication. Nature experiences like these have the potential to raise our awareness of ourselves as part of nature. For one, this can create a spiritual connection to the place that is expressed in the annual greeting of the migratory birds.

In fact, I believe that it is an important task for the future to give urban nature a more diverse value than we do today. We can learn to appreciate human-nature relationships in many different ways. Yet how can we guarantee that our value judgements about nature lead to regeneration and protection rather than destruction and exploitation? How does planning and politics in our cities need to change to consider these diverse perspectives on the value of nature in their decision-making processes?

Valuing nature in spatial and urban planning

The concept of Ecosystem Services is an increasingly established perspective of valuing nature in urban and spatial planning: Using this, values can be attributed to the meadow in the newspaper article. For example, the meadow provides cultural Ecosystem Services by serving human recreation. The experience of listening to bird calls is also characterised by cultural aspects. Beyond this, urban nature can fulfil many other functions: provisioning Ecosystem Services (supply of drinking water or clean air), regulating Ecosystem Services (climate regulation) and supporting Ecosystem Services (e.g. contributions to the nutrient cycle). From this perspective, urban nature is valuable because it can provide benefits or certain services to people (see infobox: Living from nature). A very similar perspective. Which can be understood as an extension of the Ecosystem Services concept, are Nature's Contributions to people. It has also been developed as part of the work of IPBES and attempts to take greater account of the global plurality of knowledge systems and values (Díaz et al. 2015; Pascual et al. 2017). Fundamentally, this perspective says that a certain aspect of nature (a species, an ecosystem, etc.) can make different contributions to people while being linked to different values (see infobox: Living with, in and as nature). It is therefore not only important to look at what contributions’ nature makes, but also what values we connect to it and how we justify the importance of nature in the particular context.

Judgements about the importance of nature are expressed through specific values (Pascual et al. 2023). Justifications and judgements of this kind have always played an important role in urban and spatial planning, e.g. in strategic planning documents. Yet how diverse are the values articulated in these documents? And where are they being expressed in the specific planning context? These questions were the focus of a study research project that I supervised. The students were asked to analyse the significance of specific values of nature in the landscape plan of Dresden. The distinction between instrumental, relational and intrinsic values of nature served as a theoretical framework (see info box). To give an example: The students looked at how the value of the regulating capacity of urban soils is justified in the landscape plan. They have identified a passage where the importance of regulatory capacity is justified by the fact that it ensures the water supply in Dresden. This justification refers to an instrumental value. In another section of the text, students identified the statement ‘wanting to live in a healthy natural environment’ as a rationale for the importance of regulatory capacity. In this case, the importance is justified differently by considering the soil as part of a ‘healthy environment’ with which humans have a meaningful relationship. This justification could then be interpreted as an expression of relational values. In my opinion, the analysis shows that one and the same contribution of nature can be linked to different values and confirms the relevance of dealing with value articulations in the context of urban and spatial planning. In this way, it is possible to make the diverse values of nature more visible in planning and thus increase the probability in the long term that they will be taken into account more consciously and in a more balanced way in future strategies.

Diverse valuation of nature in the city

Despite the previously described diversity of views on the values of nature, policy and planning in Germany has so far predominantly prioritised the narrow group of instrumental values. This has contributed to the establishment of exploitative and unjust conditions worldwide, in which only certain people claim advantages for themselves and restrict the value of nature for people and other living beings. I think, we need to discard the prevailing values that focus only on short-term and individual material gains. Instead, we should promote values that focus on strong sustainability and respect our relational embeddedness in the cycle of life, recognising that we are connected with all living beings. Even the classical German dictionary Duden provides inspiring synonyms for the verb ‘wertschätzen’ (to value), including ‘hochachten’ (to esteem), ‘respektieren’ (to honour) and ‘anerkennen’ (to recognise). What would our cities look like if we value our relationship with nature anew with esteem, honour and recognition?

Besides these qualities of valuing, the question to remain is whose values are heard in the city and ultimately become spatially effective. How can we improve integrating the diverse values of nature into our urban decision-making processes instead of leaving them to a company as an investment? Private landowners or an investing company can quickly become a black box for third parties, as their decisions often lack transparency. In our example, this is particularly critical as we learn nothing about the valuation method used to determine the value of nature. If the property is owned by the municipality, a transparent participation process to reveal the multiple perspectives on nature's values could be more easily initiated. These municipal assessment procedures could be designed in such a way that they take equal account of the values of nature from different stakeholder groups. The IPBES report (see above), for example, presents more than 50 assessment methods for evaluating nature from a variety of perspectives. In my view, another way for changing decision-making processes would be to extend the rights of nature: For example, the Network for the Rights of Nature has launched an initiative to reform the the German Basic Law, which aims to have other living beings or even entire ecosystems recognised as legal subjects. Such a reform would mean that our relationship with nature is less determined by property rights and increasingly based on responsibility. In a case similar to the one in New York, it would not be the owners who decide whether and how they want to lease the land to a company, but the affected nature itself would have a right to a say as a legal subject

Author: Philip Harms

If you have any questions or thoughts arising from my essay, please feel free to contact me: p.harms@ioer.de.

References

Díaz, Sandra; Demissew, Sebsebe; Carabias, Julia; Joly, Carlos; Lonsdale, Mark; Ash, Neville et al. (2015): The IPBES Conceptual Framework — connecting nature and people. In: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14, S. 1–16. DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2014.11.002.

IPBES (2022): Methodological assessment of the diverse values and valuation of nature of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Unter Mitarbeit von Patricia Balvanera, Unai Pascual, Michael Christie und David González-Jiménez. Online verfügbar unter https://zenodo.org/records/7687931.

Pascual, Unai; Balvanera, Patricia; Anderson, Christopher B.; Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca; Christie, Michael; González-Jiménez, David et al. (2023): Diverse values of nature for sustainability. In: Nature 620 (7975), S. 813–823. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06406-9.

Pascual, Unai; Balvanera, Patricia; Díaz, Sandra; Pataki, György; Roth, Eva; Stenseke, Marie et al. (2017): Valuing nature’s contributions to people: the IPBES approach. In: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 26-27, S. 7–16. DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2016.12.006.