In Defense of Ecourbanism

EKO ECO Guest Blogger on April 14, 2010 Comment

By Kelly Moore Brands, Carbon & Biodiversity Research Assistant

What do you do when urban development turns a pristine wetland into a concrete jungle (Washington D.C., sound familiar?)? Over the years, cities have paved over paradise and made not only parking lots, but apartment buildings, grocery and retail stores, office buildings and basketball courts. Ready to admit it or not, most of us live our lives in these cities (and generally live more efficiently than those in rural areas) and enjoy the amenities that they bring. These days, each new development brings with it the chance not only to enhance our lives economically, but a chance to bring back the jungle, bit by bit. Biodiverse landscaping, green roof installation and grey water catchment systems are just a few of the options that give us an opportunity to increase the amount of biodiversity in our increasingly sterile lives.

A recent paper in In Practice argues that while tools like conservation credits (paying for development impacts to biodiversity aka biodiversity offsetting) are important for achieving no net loss of biodiversity, policies need to be in place to ensure that with each new urban development comes a new rooftop garden or small prairie landscape as close as possible to the original impact site, instead of balancing that loss with the protection of land far outside the city limits. Without strong policy for enhancing city landscapes when they are impacted by development, future developers will never see the reasoning in preventing further loss. And because urban developers often don't see themselves as a beneficiary (or are *gasp* not aware) of ecosystem services, the choice of, say, paying into a compensation fund for their impacts to biodiversity may soon become one that leads to less and less biodiversity in the places where we spend the majority of our lives.