ABSTRACT
Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere: Stewardship of Green Infrastructure and Urban Ecosystem Services ERIK ANDERSSON, STEPHAN BARTHEL, SARA BORGSTRÖM, JOHAN COLDING, THOMAS ELMQVIST, CARL FOLKE, AND ÅSA GREN
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The rate of urban growth is unprecedented. The Earth System has become urbanized in the sense that decisions by the majority of the human population now living in cities affect the resilience of the entire planet (Seto et al. 2011). Urban demand for ecosystem services is a major driver behind global environmental change but the choices people make are often disconnected from their environmental imprint in distant places (Folke et al. 1997; Grimm et al. 2008). Much of urban growth has been at the expense of the capacity of terrestrial and marine systems to generate and sustain essential ecosystem services (Foley et al. 2005) and is currently challenging
biophysical planetary boundaries for the world as we know it (Rockström et al. 2009). There is an urgent need to reconnect people in urban areas to the biosphere (Folke et al. 2011).
