Trends in municipal and comprehensive planning (1980-2012) from an Ecosystem Services Perspective in Southern Sweden

In Sweden a unique project supported by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency is developed in close collaboration with seven coastal municipalities in Skåne. These municipalities face a range of different environmental challenges, from municipalities along the eastern coast line to municipalities in the western Öresund region. Research questions and approaches are built on case studies and scenarios to assess local municipality planning processes. The objective is to study the premises of implementing the use of the Ecosystem Service (ES) approach in municipal planning and decision making. This study presents a project component that focuses on the analysis of the comprehensive plans in the city of Malmö from 1980 to 2012. Interviews with staff from municipal departments were done as a complement to the collection of data from the comprehensive plans. The results show current trends in municipal and comprehensive planning from an ES perspective, i.e., the use of ES as a tool for sustainable development. The results further show that the ES concept was explicitly first found in the comprehensive plan from 2012. Implicitly, approaches for ecosystem services management and related planning changed from “land use”, “green areas” and “green space” (1980) towards “recreation” (1990) and “biological life cycle” and “biodiversity” (2000). This change indicates that the process in local municipality planning has shifted towards a more holistic view of the importance of ecosystems for a sustainable society and healthy life, which is currently further advanced via the ES concept