Synergies and trade-offs in ecosystem services’ provision: identifying spatial bundling in Sardinia.

As per the definition by the European Commission, a green infrastructure is “a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas […] designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services”. From a natural scientist’s standpoint, this definition is problematic because human-centred, as residual naturalness in Europe is here thought of as something to be managed and planned to maintain ecosystem services (ES), hence the goods and services provided by nature to humans. Moreover, “a wide range” implies that several ES can be delivered simultaneously; while some ES are often jointly provided and intertwined (Bennet et al., 2009), several studies show that some interrelationships are negative and result in trade-offs (Madureira and Andresen, 2014), especially as regards provisioning ES. Therefore, by building on spatially explicit assessments of seven ES carried out in previous studies (Lai and Leone, 2017; Floris, 2020; Lai et al., 2020; 2021), this piece of work aims at investigating multifunctionality, i.e., an area’s capacity to provide simultaneously multiple ES, to identify areas of territorial specialization on which planning policies can be grounded. Sardinia, an Italian island, is chosen as a case study because its low residential density, low endowment of infrastructure, and persistence of traditional agricultural and farming practices have preserved a good level of naturalness, which is a prerequisite for the delivery of ES. The scale is that of municipalities, which, in Italy, represent the lowest administrative tier in charge of land-use planning, as land-use and land-cover changes are the most important factors affecting ES provision. The seven ES here considered are as follows: habitat quality as potential nursery for species (QUHAB); global climate regulation (carbon sequestration and storage: CO2SEQ); local climate regulation (mitigation of land surface temperature REGTEMP); agricultural and forestry productivity (PRODAF); ecosystem-based potential recreation (POTRIC); intrinsic value of biodiversity for present and future generations (INTBIO); landscape quality, reflecting cultural identity and sense of place (QUPAES)