Cities are Planning for Biodiversity: A global survey of city plans

A global scale understanding of how cities promote biodiversity and ecosystem services in city planning is underdeveloped. Urban planning scholars use the concept of policy mobility to explore similarities in planning ideas across different settings. If there are wide variations in the ways planning documents discuss biodiversity and ecosystem services, that could indicate planners are working without a broadly shared set of ideas. Taking a snapshot of urban planning practices, we did two comparisons of the ways 135 planning documents from 40 cities around the world discuss biodiversity and ecosystem services. Our comparisons found similar combinations of goals and targets for biodiversity and ecosystem services across cities. First, in plans from cities in the Global North versus the Global South, and second, across five categories of planning documents. These results indicate there is a loosely coherent set of goals and measurable targets for biodiversity and ecosystem services that is not yet standardized. Practices that could be used more widely are setting measurable targets and including biodiversity and ecosystem services topics more consistently in climate plans and comprehensive master plans.