Uptake of ecosystem service concept in urban blue-green infrastructure planning and decision-making in Russia

In recent years, the related concepts of ecosystem services (ESs) and blue-green infrastructure (BGI) have been promoted in urban decision-making and planning (Braat & de Groot 2012; Brondizio et al. 2019) to better consider and provide a magnitude of benefits for human well-being and quality of life (van den Bosch & Sang 2017; UN DESA 2023). This is caused among others by many challenges faced by the urban environment both globally and locally, such as the projected continued growth of urban population (UN 2018), climate change, biodiversity loss (UNEP 2021; IPCC 2022; UN DESA 2023), the increasing demand of residents for urban greening and the benefits it brings (Twohig-Bennett & Jones 2018; Whitburn et al. 2018; Campbell-Arvai 2019), and the general call for urban development making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable (UN 2015; UN-Habitat 2017, 2020).

Thanks to such significant problematization, policy-makers of different levels are beginning to include the concept of ES in their guidelines and strategies including participatory planning contexts (Ruckelshaus et al. 2015; Spyra et al. 2019). But these examples and cases are more of a first experience than permanent practices in urban planning and decision-making (Grunewald et al. 2021). Even though the concept of ES has the potential to contribute to more integrated urban planning, its use remains primarily in the scientific domain (Mononen et al. 2016). The main issues discussed in the context of integrating ES into urban planning are as follows: (a) no unified definition and classification of ES, and then approaches to quantifying and valuing them (de Groot et al. 2010; Lam & Conway 2018); (b) lack of interdisciplinary collaboration involving researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and citizens that incorporates the diversity of stakeholder perceptions, knowledge, and preferences (Hauck et al. 2013; Frantzeskaki & Kabisch 2016; Alves et al. 2018; ); (c) little knowledge about the contribution of existing and ongoing research on BGI and ES to providing an evidence base for decision-making (Potter 2020; Voskamp et al. 2021; Frantzeskaki et al. 2022); (d) taking into account the planning processes for all types of urban areas: public, private, organizations, and so forth (Bush et al. 2021).

There are plenty of studies assessing urban ES as well as some practical cases of integrating ES into urban planning in Europe, North America, and Asia (Haase et al. 2014; Brzoska & Spāģe 2020). In Russia, few research projects to assess ES have been carried out at different levels: from the case study level (Matasov et al. 2020) or object (type of urban BGI) (Matasov et al. 2023; Vasenev et al. 2023) to the city level (Klimanova et al. 2021), and for different types of ES: from regulatory and supporting services (Illarionova et al. 2021; Varentsov et al. 2023) to cultural services (Aleksandriiskaia & Klimanova 2021; Dushkova et al. 2021). Additionally, several projects on valuation of ES and their inclusion into urban planning have been conducted during recent years. Most of them were initiated by landscape architects interested in new methods and ways to redesign urban BGI including streets, parks, and outdoor territories in residential complexes. Such projects demonstrate successful integration of ES with the aim to redevelop former industrial areas (Matasov et al. 2021), to carry out street renovation in Cherepovets city (Romzaikina & Bulantseva 2023), or to create a new innovative scientific and technological center for Moscow State University ‘Vorobyovy Gory’ (Myznikova et al. 2023). However, not all such projects find their practical application and have been implemented. And when they are, examples are few and they are definitely not a part of the everyday development of urban areas in Russia, facing a lot of challenges (including lack of funding, interest of government decision-makers, and stakeholders' involvement).

Another big challenge for the inclusion of ES in the practice of urban planning and development is lack of regulatory documents. Works investigating the representation of ES in city documents have been repeatedly carried out for the countries of North America and Europe (see, for example, Cortinovis & Geneletti 2018; Lam & Conway 2018). However, for Russia, there are only a couple of examples of investigating references to ES in national documents such as urban Master Plans (called ‘genplans’ in Russian) (Klimanova 2020) or a set of strategic and methodological documents: The Urban planning code of the Russian Federation, Spatial development strategy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025, Set of rules ‘SP 42.13330.2016. City building. Planning and development of urban and rural settlements’, Methodology for the formation of the urban environment quality index, and Standard for integrated development of territories (Maximova 2021), but a more comprehensive analysis of cities at various scales is missing.

The goal of the study is to understand to what extent the concept of ES has been adopted in urban BGI planning and decision-making in Russia. We use a mixed-method approach employing document analysis, interviews, and an online survey of stakeholders (both from academia and practice) to investigate the state of the art in cities of various types across the country.

This study seeks to answer the following Research Questions (RQs):

• (1) How familiar are stakeholders of urban planning and decision-making with the concepts of ES and BGI? To what extent are they used in practice?

• (2) How are the ES and BGI concepts, in explicit and implicit terms, represented in documents regulating planning and management of urban green spaces? In relation to which ES are they referred to and how broad is the thematic scope within these documents?

• (3) Which challenges to better integration of ES into urban planning exist in Russia, according to the stakeholders?

• (4) Which tools and other solutions are proposed by stakeholders to foster higher uptake of ES in decision-making and urban planning?

Step 1. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. The interviews were addressing RQs 1, 3, and 4. The pool of 30 respondents from Russian cities of various scales (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Apatity, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod) were selected. They were representatives of both practical and theoretical fields: landscape architects; specialists involved in urban planning; scientists in various areas of urban studies; city managers and representatives of city administrations; city communities, volunteers, and so forth (Table 1). The sample was formed using the snowballing method. Interviews took place online and onsite from May to November 2021. The duration of each interview ranged from 23 min to 1 h 40 min. The semi-structured guide consisted of 12 questions (see Annexure A1 in Supplementary material). All interviews were recorded and later transcribed (with prior consent from the participants). We then applied thematic analysis to the transcripts similarly to the following examples: de Sousa et al. (2019); Krawatzek (2018); Sörensen et al. (2021).

Step 2. Survey among stakeholders. Upon analysis of stakeholder interviews, it was confirmed that we need to verify our findings with a broader audience (thus this step also contributed to answering RQs 1, 3, and 4). For this an online questionnaire was created based on the key findings of interviews. The questionnaire included 18 questions of different types (see Annexure A2 in Supplementary material). The survey was conducted by using Google Survey. The main recruitment of respondents took place among participants of the Smart and Sustainable Cities Conference (July 20–22, 2022, Moscow, Russia) (ssc-conf.org)) and then complemented with email invitations sent out to the partner organizations. The final sample included 84 respondents representing 24 Russian cities and various specializations and positions: landscape architects; specialists in urban planning, city managers and representatives of state authorities, scientists, and employees of nonprofit and public organizations (Table 1). This sample included stakeholders from some of the same cities as included in the semi-structured interviews: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Apatity, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod as well as representatives of other cities such as Voronezh, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, and so on. Data analysis and visualization were carried out using Microsoft Excel.

Step 3. Document analysis. Finally, to obtain a fuller picture and address RQ2, we also reviewed the documents regulating planning and management of BGI in Russian cities. Three types of documents were selected. The first type was the Master Plan (a site plan, ‘generalny plan’ in Russian), a top-level strategic planning document that is responsible for the comprehensive development of the city's territory. The content of the Master Plan is approved by Article 23 of the Urban Development Code of the Russian Federation (Urban Planning Code of the Russian Federation 2004). It is one of the main documents of territorial planning. As a rule, the Master Plan contains an analytical block and a project proposal block. Each of them, in turn, includes graphic materials presented in the form of maps (diagrams), and a text part. Among the mandatory diagrams is the use of the city territory with the display of the boundaries of lands of various categories, including green areas. The second type of document was the Rules of Landscaping (the territory improvement rules) that aim at the territory's upgrading including creating comfortable conditions for people and creating beautiful areas. The content of the Rules of Landscaping is approved by Article 45.1 of the Federal Law ‘On the General Principles of Local Self-Government Organization in the Russian Federation’ (Federal Law 2003). The Rules of Landscaping regulate issues of organizing landscaping of the territory of a city, including the procedure for creating, maintaining, restoring, and protecting lawns, flower beds, and other green areas. The third type of document was one of the following: the Rules for the maintenance and protection of green spaces/Rules for the maintenance of the green fund (green plantings)/Rules for creating green spaces. These rules regulate the issues of creating, maintaining, preserving, and restoring urban green spaces. They also describe the procedure for coordinating the construction of facilities in urban green spaces.

From the combined cities' samples obtained during the online survey and stakeholder interviews, we selected six cities, representing different population size categories, and supplemented them with another set of six cities. The selection of the latter was based on the three following criteria: (1) city population size; (2) different geographical locations of the cities; (3) the presence of more than two types of documents regulating the planning and management of BGI. The final list included cities with more than 1 million inhabitants (Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnoyarsk, Kazan), between 100 thousand and 1 million inhabitants (Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Tyumen, Vologda), and below 100 thousand inhabitants (Apatity, Magadan, Mozhaisk, Elista). For two cities the set of documents was not complete, the Rules for the maintenance of green spaces were missing in Magadan and Mozhaisk. The document analysis used the mixed quantitative and qualitative content analysis approach (White et al. 2006; Drisko & Maschi 2016; Krippendorff 2018) where explicit and implicit references to the ES concepts and related terms as well as references to specific ES were identified and counted similarly to in the following studies (Mascarenhas et al. 2015; Cortinovis & Geneletti 2018; Lam & Conway 2018).

The interviewed stakeholders stated that they use different terms related to ‘blue-green infrastructure’ in their professional lives. The following related terms have been mentioned most frequently: ‘green spaces (greenery)’ (54 experts), ‘green network’ (51 experts), ‘water-green network’ (34 experts), ‘natural (nature) network’ (33 experts), and ‘water-green infrastructure’ (Russian interpretation of BGI) (24 experts). At the same time, experts noted the lack of cohesiveness in the terms used, stating a lack of a common understanding in the Russian professional community, as well as difficulties in matching them to their equivalents in foreign languages.

As for related terms, the following have been most frequently named: ‘ecological functions’ (21 respondents), ‘ecosystem functions’ (16 respondents), ‘ecosystem resources’ (five respondents), and ‘ecosystem opportunities’ (five respondents).

Regardless of the city that the non-academic stakeholders work in, they stated that the concept of ES is not frequently used and/or this term either entered their professional field relatively recently, and/or remained incomprehensible to most of their colleagues.

As expected the term ‘ecosystem services’ is more familiar among experts from academia. In this sphere, as pointed out by the experts, the major bulk of work on the interpretation and evaluation of ES is still carried out with very few specific examples of projects in practice.

We found no explicit mentions of the term ‘blue-green infrastructure’ in the studied 34 documents for 12 cities. Instead, such terms as ‘green spaces’ and ‘green area’ are mainly used. The terms ‘green network’, ‘ecological network ‘, ‘water-green network’, ‘natural network’ were found in three Master Plans and three Rules of landscaping for nine cities out of the 12 reviewed. The term ‘green network’ (Russian term ‘zelenii karkas’ which is equivalent to the urban BGI) was applied mainly at the macro level and was not mentioned in normative documents such as the Rules for the maintenance of green spaces.

The term ‘ecosystem services’ has not been found in the studied documents either. At the same time mentions of what could be interpreted as benefits to people (implicit references), i.e. ES, have been detected in the documents. In the studied 34 documents for 12 cities the total number of such references was 188 (Table 2). The largest number was noted in the medium-sized city in the far-east – Vladivostok (67 mentions). Most cities varied in the range from 10 to 20 mentions. The most common mention of ES was found in the Rules of landscaping (a total of 88 mentions). At the same time, there were far fewer such references in the Rules for maintaining green spaces (Rules for the maintenance of green spaces/Rules for the creation, maintenance/Rules for the protection of the green fund). Only for two cities with populations of over 1 million people (Kazan and Krasnoyarsk) were there more references to ES in such documents.

Explicit references to specific ES in the studied documents were broad in scope and covered all four categories of ES (Table 3). There were a total of 13 cases of mentions of provisioning ES, 79 on regulating ES, 88 on cultural ES, and 14 on supporting ES. That is, the most common were regulating services, primarily sanitary protection; dust reduction and air purification; noise reduction; microclimate regulation, and cultural services among which the most common were recreation and sport; aesthetic experiences; and comfort/well-being. As for types of biota, animals were mentioned twice as provisioning ES (fishing and grazing) and once as cultural ES (bird watching). ES of water bodies were mentioned 14 times. All other 177 mentions of ES presented in documents were related to plants.

While there were several mentions to specific ES, further elaboration on how to approach/assess/facilitate their production were less often present, in the studied Master Plans in four places, and in the Rules of landscaping in seven places (including cases of references to explanatory documents). Explanations were given for the following ES: noise protection, exhaust gas protection, recreation, and strengthening of slopes (in the Master Plans), and delimitation of space, spring water intake, wind protection, noise protection, and drainage (in the Rules of landscaping). Thus, in total, the considered Master plans and Rules of landscaping explained the implementation of nine types of various ES: seven regulating and two cultural (see Table A in Annexure A3 in Supplementary material). There were no explanations for provisioning and supporting services.

The methods for implementing ES were presented in the Master Plan of Vladivostok when referring to recreational sustainability. Specifically, this document contained a relationship between the benefits of green spaces and their carrying capacity, while documents for other cities presented this calculation without benefit assessment.

According to the results of the survey, the key limitations associated with the regulation and methodological support of the introduction of ES were supplemented by: the lack of holders of knowledge and skills; the lack of guidelines to develop ES for strategic planning of cities; the lack of public demand; and the conflict of interests among the main stakeholders. Issues tied to the provision of resources for this are less significant.

At the same time, the requests for the elimination of regulatory gaps in the respective field and the introduction of new forms of standardization and regulation, while clearly voiced during interviews, did not amount to the most significant measure in the survey. The following aspects focused on the formation of atypical, but unique targeted approaches in the implementation of ES came forward: ‘identifying priority services for a particular region or geographical conditions’; and ‘transition to planning based on reliable data on the state of the urban environment’.

Also, the stakeholders unanimously ranked the measures of the ‘education and awareness’ group highly, which are aimed at greater involvement of professionals, decision-makers, and the public in understanding the concept of ES.

The aim of this study was to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the uptake of the ES and related concept of urban BGI in the practice of urban planning and decision-making in Russia. For this we interviewed and surveyed stakeholders (both professionals and scientists) from a range of cities across the country. In addition, we also performed document analysis of the main regulatory and planning documents for 12 cities of various sizes for the explicit and implicit mentions of the ES.

BGI and the term's equivalents are quite clear to and used in urban management and urban planning by all groups of stakeholders. The terms green spaces or green areas are more common when speaking about green infrastructure as specific places or objects. And the concept of an urban green network (sometimes ecological network or water-green network) is used in the case of creating connected green spaces or green belts in the city (Klimanova et al. 2021). Thus, historically, the term ‘ecological network’ has been used in Russian urban planning practice, implying the division of the territory into functional zones, the removal of protected areas (cores) that perform the functions of biodiversity conservation from urban centers and the connection of these cores with ‘green (ecological) corridors’ (Panchenko & Dukarev 2010). Adhering to this tradition, experts use terms that are identical to the ecological network: ‘green network’, ‘water-green network’, ‘natural (nature) network’. However, the term ‘green spaces’ (in Russian more often ‘green plantings’) is used in Russian legislative practice and means ‘a set of trees, shrubs and herbaceous vegetation in a certain area’ which is narrower than ‘green spaces’ worldwide. At the same time, the international term ‘blue-green infrastructure’ is beginning to come into use, but in its more comfortable phonetic Russian equivalent – ‘water-green infrastructure’. The concept of BGI is broader in terms of the volume of elements included and represents a more ‘flexible’ design for the process of territorial planning in cities (Klimanova et al. 2020). These terms are also more frequently presented in documents, but there is no specific elaboration of the key purposes and benefits of its creation. This means that when making a decision, those responsible may not have grounds and sufficient argumentation in favor of a green infrastructure (Cortinovis & Geneletti 2018). Other studies have argued even though urban planners and policy-makers often recognize multiple benefits from BGI, still there is growing definitional ambiguity as well as path dependency, which are major obstacles for better uptake of this and related concepts (Matthews et al. 2015; Keenan et al. 2019). Green infrastructure in this perception has no functional load also because there is no demand analysis for ecosystem functions. When planning engineering networks (pipes, cables, etc.), they consider the load of consumers, but in this case, it is more like ‘painting useless lands in green color’, to build a green network in ravines and wastelands, where it must be ‘good’ and ‘eco-friendly’. Conversely, in Russia the interests of architects and urban planners in urban ecology is actively developing now, so we can see a rise of interest in this topic. Both terms (BGI and ES) share a certain degree of ambiguity. However, interestingly, the term ES or similar ones are used much less by the respondents in their professional activities than BGI. As anticipated, the term ES is more familiar among scientists than practitioners. And in cases when practitioners were aware of the term and potentially could use it, they've elaborated that it was difficult to do so because the ‘end users/customers’ are not familiar with it. Moreover, we found that the term ES is also not represented in documents such as the Master Plans, which is consistent with findings of Klimanova et al. (2020), who investigated sections on environmental protection and green spaces development in Master Plans of Russian cities. The same results when the concept of ES has not been considered in any planning tools across scales were obtained in studies in non-English speaking countries such as Slovakia (Bezák et al. 2017), Belgium (Bauler & Pipart 2014), Poland (Piwowarczyk et al. 2013), and Portugal (Mascarenhas et al. 2015). However, the related concepts such as ‘functions’, ‘values’, and ‘benefits’ can be found in documents as it was discovered for Chinese cities (Chen et al. 2023). At the same time, we found few implicit references to different ES in the examined documents as well as separate descriptions of some of them, for example, ‘mediation of noise impact’ or ‘soil drainage improvement’. This suggests that the multitude of ES are not recognized as such by stakeholders/end users and thus are not planned or managed for. The most represented in implicit mentions of ES in urban plans and normative documents are regulatory and cultural services. These results concur with the findings obtained during the analyses of Russian federal urban planning documents done by Maximova (2021) and other international studies (Hansen et al. 2015; Cortinovis & Geneletti 2018). The priority for cultural services – recreation and aesthetics – is in line with similar studies of Canadian documents (Lam & Conway 2018).

Most regulatory documents, even if they include some types of ES, still lack a strategic approach that allows linking planning decisions to their overall effects on both the supply and demand of urban ES. This short-term planning in environmental management was also identified as a barrier to development of ES by Keenan et al. (2019). As a rule, if an ES is mentioned once in a document, this can be regarded as clarifying the meaning of this service. If a document mentions an ES more than once, it can be expected to provide a more detailed description of the main criteria and options for assessment. However, the documents lack links between ES and specific actions necessary for their assessment and implementation as well as goals and benefits. In our study, only 11 documents included such an explanation. This can influence the adoption of informed decisions on the care and operation of green spaces (Cortinovis & Geneletti 2018; Ronchi et al. 2020). That is why it makes sense to add monetary assessment of ES provided by each type of BGI to clarify its economic benefits and value for urban development. As stated by Grunewald et al. (2021), monetarization and public pressure can be considered as promoting factors for the inclusion of ES concepts in decision-making and spatial planning.

The existing documents include the replacement cost when dismantling green spaces. This cost consists of the assessment of typical types (categories) of green spaces and landscaping objects, calculated by summing up all types of costs associated with their creation and maintenance, in terms of one conventional tree, shrub, unit of area, linear meter, and (or) another specific unit. It makes sense to add to this calculation the value of the ES provided by the urban BGI. This could help change the logic from reducing urban green spaces (seeing them only for the associated costs) to promoting their creation or preservation. This can lead to the assessment of ES and their use as an argument when making decisions in city management.

Thus, difficulties in introducing ES into regulatory practice are everywhere and Russia is not an exception. But the legacy of city greening practices in the USSR is likely to still influence perceptions to some extent. There was a quite productive and deep knowledge of greenery (landscaping) which was not expressed during the interviews. Here we discuss the situation in the USSR. At that time practitioners and scientists did not link ecological functions and processes to market benefits. This fact now leads to the following circumstances: the older generation of scientists is against the term (ESs) and does not want to introduce it to the regulators. And the younger generation may poorly understand the processes of natural ecosystems functioning (due to the lack of life-long pondering of natural processes), but they constantly use the ‘fashionable’ terminology of ES. As a result many architects become imposters in the field of planning natural processes, drawing shapes and color combinations, rather than biogeochemical cycles and mosaics of phytocoenosis. In some ways, this ultimately discredits the ES approach itself and leads to greenwashing. But, while these days Russia operates in a market economy, this transformation in perception from functions to services could be very important for BGI planning with the ES concepts. And to better understand this, it would be worthwhile to compare documents from the Soviet period and the current ones, as well as to target practitioners from various age groups and consider this variable in the analyses. The overarching nature of the concept of ES and the complexity of its operationalization in urban planning previously reported by other studies (Mononen et al. 2016) emphasizes the need for solutions and a new sense of transition from science into practice. The stakeholders note that this transition meets with a wide range of limitations that are generally consistent with those identified in other studies. Among them there are the lack of methodologies, skills, and experience in assessing ES among professionals (Van Oijstaeijen et al. 2020; Grunewald et al. 2021; Sörensen et al. 2021); the lack of regulatory specification of the ES concept and related terms on federal, regional, and municipal (local) levels (Grunewald et al. 2021); uninformed stakeholders (customers, developers, city authorities) (Kaczorowska et al. 2016; Wihlborg et al. 2019; Grunewald et al. 2021); and the lack of understanding of the potential benefits from the valuation of ES (Kabisch 2015) and interdepartmental and multiscale coordination (Rall et al. 2015). However, the rating of these limitations by stakeholders does not allow the prioritization of several other key ones, as most of them are seen as important by the respondents.

Our findings highlighted the key challenges and possible measures for practical integration of ES in urban planning and its increased use by the professional community in Russia, which could be used to guide changes in how the integration has been approached so far. The experts ranked the ‘education and enlightenment’ category of measures highly. This category is aimed at greater involvement of professionals, decision-makers, and the public in understanding and using the concept of ES. Training local experts in the approaches and tools is important for building local capacity, ownership, trust, and long-term success (Ruckelshaus et al. 2015). It is important to use all possible types of approaches and events, including educational programs, discussions and debates, summer schools, open lectures and workshops, publications in the media and professional publications, and so on (Ruckelshaus et al. 2015; Wihlborg et al. 2019). These measures can lead to the emergence of a higher number of professionals who understand the concept, know how to implement its elements into BGI planning and management practices, and are eager and capable of promoting it among colleagues. As is shown in the study by Frantzeskaki & Kabisch (2016), policy officers, urban planners, practitioners, and scientists learn from each other, and highlight the impact of this knowledge co-production for governance practice. Also, these actions can lead to the emergence of a conscious request for ES among citizens and customers of projects, as well as to an increase in leadership and communication to numerous stakeholders including policy-makers and the public (Kaczorowska et al. 2016; Keenan et al. 2019; Spyra et al. 2019).

It is also increasingly necessary to overcome the limitations associated with methodological incompleteness and imperfections. As was underlined by Lam & Conway (2018), it is crucial to incorporate a working definition of ES in policy documents that helps guide municipalities and urban planners, adopting a broader focus on a variety of services. The development and testing of assessment methods and techniques by professionals needs to be a priority followed by their inclusion into detailed guidelines used to support the process of implementing ES in urban planning (Beery et al. 2016). These assessments need to be multidisciplinary in nature, not only conducting ecological or economic evaluation of a subset of values of green spaces as is often done but also covering diversity of these green spaces in order to better reflect the magnitude of provided benefits (Pascual et al. 2023). Moreover, it is important to calculate the benchmark costs of provision of each ES for different Russian regions taking into account such features as climate conditions, air quality, and so on. Other financial instruments also could be proposed, including potential commercial investment in ES through government regulated markets (Keenan et al. 2019) or implementation of ES in concrete land-use decisions, for example, in transfer of development rights (Bruno et al. 2023).

At the same time, there is a request for the elimination of regulatory gaps and the introduction of new forms of standardization and regulation. First, a Russian State standard (GOST) containing a definition of ES as well as their classification reflecting the full diversity of values of green spaces is associated with Pascual et al. (2023). Second, it is very important to establish a common practice whereby ES benefits as well as the results of calculations of their assessments are included in local documents such as city strategies, socioeconomic development strategies, the justification of general plans, and landscaping rules as is done in several countries (Bush et al. 2021). This can be one of the supporting arguments for taking decisions at the local level based on the harm and benefits that will come from the dismantling or arrangement of fragments of nature in the city.

Finally, planning actions that explicitly address the supply of urban ES are often not grounded on an appropriate scientific basis (Cortinovis & Geneletti 2018), which may ultimately undermine their effectiveness, while the effects on demand are mostly overlooked. At the same time, valuing ES in a joint co-production process with different stakeholders, such as city dwellers, developers, and decision-makers, can yield successful solutions to environmental problems. Such a process requires combined efforts of different scientific disciplines and an active dialogue with and between stakeholders from policy-makers to the society at large (Faehnle et al. 2014; Frantzeskaki & Kabisch 2016; Di Marino et al. 2019). There is an increasing awareness that the development of strategic actions and documents should foster collaboration between stakeholders (Hauck et al. 2013; Alves et al. 2018), and collaborative planning needs to become a standard practice in cities (Spyra et al. 2019; Frantzeskaki et al. 2022). Development of decision support systems and tools should provide helpful functionalities through collaboration between interdisciplinary researchers and the end users. Although a lot of decision support systems already provide helpful functionalities worldwide, they are not yet integrated into everyday decision-making, mainly because they do not readily fit into planning processes in practice (Wissen Hayek et al. 2016; Grêt-Regamey et al. 2017; Van Oijstaeijen et al. 2020). Collaborative efforts provide a way to overcome this challenge.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of ES inclusion in urban planning and decision-making in Russia. We collected and systematized a diverse corpus of Russian documents in the field of urban planning and compared it with a series of interviews and online surveys with stakeholders of various specializations and positions to show the existing gap between them. Such an overview may be of interest in the context of the uneven development of the ES concept in different countries, considering their historical and current realities.

We conclude that in Russian cities practitioners rarely use ES in their work, nor are they adequately reflected in regulatory and planning documents. Poor awareness among practitioners as well as disagreements over the meaning of terms have been listed by stakeholders as the main limitations. Stakeholders who participated in our survey and interviews identified a set of diverse measures that could improve the inclusion of ES in decision-making and a further appropriation of the ES approach by practitioners and decision-makers. Interestingly, no specific measures have been given high priority by respondents, but rather their votes were spread among many of them. ES can be integrated at different levels including the strategic level (by providing support for plans and policies, initiating structural departmental changes), the conceptual level (by raising stakeholders' awareness and reframing dialogues), and the tactical level (by guiding specific decisions).

Our results could be used to plan the future research as well as to guide changes in urban BGI planning. This new agenda should include measures to fill gaps in the methodological approaches and to elaborate methods to assess urban ES at various scales. At the same time, it is important to include ES in regulative and strategic documents and to identify ES demand and the key groups of beneficiaries. Finally, increasing awareness of ES and the benefits they provide could ensure profound commitment and inclusion in the implementation cases and strengthen arguments for decision-makers. Therefore, to truly address ES inclusion in practice and decision-making, the future research needs to center on the co-production approaches including a diversity of stakeholders and contexts.

We would like to thank all the stakeholders who participated in the interviews, completing our surveys, and providing their feedback, which delivered valuable information about the local context.

A.K. contributed to writing – review & editing, writing – original draft, conceptualization, visualization, project administration. A.F. contributed to writing – review & editing, writing – original draft, conceptualization. O.M. contributed to writing – review & editing, writing – original draft. K.K. contributed to writing – review & editing, writing – original draft, Visualization. A.G. contributed to writing – review & editing, writing – original draft. V.M. contributed to writing – review & editing, conceptualization. V.V. contributed to methodology, funding acquisition, writing – review & editing, conceptualization.

The publication has been prepared within the Russian Science Foundation project # 19-77-30012 (formal analysis, original draft writing, project administration). The publication was also supported by Project # FSSF-2024-0023 (development of methodology, reviewing, and editing). The publication has been prepared with the support of the RUDN University Strategic Academic Leadership Program (data analysis, visualization).

All relevant data are included in the paper or its Supplementary Information.

The authors declare there is no conflict.