Ecosystems services should play hand in hand with urbanization

Green spaces in the city of Novi Sad (Serbia) provide a variety of physical, psychological, and social benefits to residents. The institutional organization is inadequate for sustainable development of city parks and provision of ecosystem services potential as a newly introduced concept. Manageable factors which influence people’s health and wellbeing are not well recognized yet. Previous research of the authors indicates possible improvements in maintaining parks, distribution of fresh water and purification of polluted water, fostering resilience of ecological systems, and reducing and protecting the environment. Most relevant categories of ecosystem services are analyzed and evaluated by a group of academic experts on a pilot basis. The variants of multi-criteria decision-making tool analytic hierarchy process (crisp, fuzzy, and hesitant) are investigated and a decision is made to apply the hesitant version of this tool as presented in this paper. Group context showed a way how to perform individual assessments and aggregate judgments of participating people into hesitant judgment matrices at all levels of the problem hierarchy. Agenda for future research in the subject area is also indicated. A part of it is the development of scoring and aggregation schemes to enable efficient interpretation of experts’ judgments aimed to define realistic priorities in preservation (management) and future investments into green city areas.

کلیدواژه ها:

urban ecosystems ، ecosystem services ، decision-making ، analytic hierarchy process