The State of the Art of Use of the Concept of Ecosystem Services within Spatial Plans in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Although the use and management of ecosystem services (ES) resources and the promotionof their provision are a standard and necessary part of spatial planning tools and documents, a directimplementation of this concept is exceptional. Researchers and entire projects have so far focusedmainly on identification of ecosystem services and their resources in urban environment, or on theanalysis of their occurrence in spatial planning documents. That was the goal of our research as well.Spatial planning documents, systematically and methodically re-defined using ecosystem services,are what is still lacking. Our article presents the results of the analysis of the use of ecosystem servicesin spatial plans of five cities, regional centers in the Czech Republic. We used a text evaluationmethodology focused on the explicit and implicit expression of ecosystem services. We analyzed theoverall approach to the creation of spatial plans. In addition to the spatial plans, we also analyzedtheir assignments (SPA). We found that the current spatial planning methodology does not work withthe ecosystem services approach (ESA) systemically. It focuses mainly on ES resources and implicitlyenvisages their provision. SPAs are a more flexible and effective tool for enforcing ESA in spatialplanning than the lengthy legislative process. However, this presupposes greater knowledge of SPAamong the public and decision makers.