{"id":191647,"date":"2022-11-01T07:00:04","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=191647"},"modified":"2022-11-01T09:33:11","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T13:33:11","slug":"greening-with-equity-dearth-of-ecosystem-services-corresponds-to-non-white-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/11\/greening-with-equity-dearth-of-ecosystem-services-corresponds-to-non-white-areas\/","title":{"rendered":"Greening with Equity: Dearth of Ecosystem Services Corresponds to Non-White Areas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making urban environments greener and giving residents greater access to nature is an increasing focus for municipalities across the country. But all too often, these efforts do not take into consideration how communities of color remain excluded from what nature has to offer.<\/p>\n

In a recent publication in Landscapes and Urban Planning<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Mayra Rodr\u00edguez Gonz\u00e1lez, assistant educator of urban and community forestry in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources<\/a>, found that people of color are inversely linked to high amounts of ecosystem services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re all aiming for greener and more resilient cities,\u201d says Rodr\u00edguez, who is a faculty member in UConn Extension<\/a>. \u201cBut what is a resilient city if its community members and residents are not equitably resilient as well? We want to make sure we reach equitable resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez collaborated with Cloutier Professor of Forestry, Robert \u201cBob\u201d Fahey in the UConn Department of Natural Resources and the Environment,<\/a> and professors Bryan Pijanowski and Brady Hardiman at Purdue University, where Rodr\u00edguez did her graduate work.<\/p>\n

Ecosystem services are the goods humans obtain from nature to improve quality of life, like access to fresh water or clean air. Ecosystem services can also include factors like not living in a flood zone or areas exposed to extreme heat.<\/p>\n

\u201cNature, when properly managed allows us to have a higher quality of life,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez says.<\/p>\n

Access to ecosystem services is often very unevenly distributed. In her paper, Rodr\u00edguez defines ecosystem service \u201chot\u201d and \u201ccold\u201d spots.<\/p>\n

A \u201chot spot\u201d is a mapped area with at least five ecosystem services provided in high amounts, defined as the top 20th percentile for that service. Rodr\u00edguez defined \u201ccold spots\u201d as areas with no ecosystem services within that top 20th percentile.<\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s paper enters a discussion about how to plan urban areas to make them more resilient, especially in the face of climate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a diversity of ecosystem services makes a city more resilient,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez says.<\/p>\n

Further, Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s research reinforced the connection between areas where more people of color live and ecosystem services cold spots.<\/p>\n

After identifying this correlation, Rodr\u00edguez looked to see if there were any publicly managed lands in areas that could be strategically enhanced to provide greater access to ecosystem services for historically marginalized groups, including Black and Latinx communities.<\/p>\n

However, the areas with the highest number of ecosystem services were conserved, publicly managed lands, which tend to overlap with predominantly white, higher-income neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough conservation and managed land throughout the region is incredibly valuable, it\u2019s not going to drastically improve access to nature for those populations that have been marginalized,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez says.<\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez also created a policy brief for the Gund Institute for the Environment including her research and other studies on the topic of land management and equity. In the brief, Rodr\u00edguez recommends obtaining land for restoration, conservation, and management in areas where diverse communities to increase access and equity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat really speaks towards being much more creative in how we\u2019re adopting spaces for us to purposely \u2018green,\u2019 make more accessible to all community members because they could then have equitable access,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez says. That said, Rodriguez also advocates for caution on how poorly planned greening efforts can lead to green gentrification.<\/p>\n

A fundamental piece of this work, Rodr\u00edguez says, is including community members in the conversation and actually listening to them. Marginalized communities may distrust or be unaware of these public programs, and they may face language barriers if diversity isn\u2019t made a central priority.<\/p>\n

Some of Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s upcoming work will share findings from a large-scale regional survey about supply and demand for ecosystem services. For example, urban residents are more interested in services related to flood prevention while rural residents are most concerned about freshwater access for irrigation since those are issues that they face most often.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to make sure the communities feel this is for them,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Follow <\/em>UConn CAHNR<\/em><\/a> on social media.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new UConn study explores how communities of color remain excluded from all that nature has to offer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":191648,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2224,2304,2300,2076,2235,2306],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2140],"class_list":["post-191647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cahnr","category-extension","category-natural-resources-environment","category-research","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-voices"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-28 14:38:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191647"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191973,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191647\/revisions\/191973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/191648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191647"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=191647"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=191647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}