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Holistic valuation of urban ecosystem services in New York City's Central Park

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 Ecosystem Services 19 (2016) 87–91

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Ecosystem Services
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecoser

Holistic valuation of urban ecosystem services in New York City's

Central Park
Paul C. Sutton a,b,n, Sharolyn J. Anderson a
a
School of Natural and Built Environments, University of South Australia, Australia
b
Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Denver, United States

art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Central Park is iconic Green Infrastructure that provides myriad ecosystem services to New York City that
Received 13 August 2015 have significant economic value. We used the market value of Central Park as developable real estate as a
Received in revised form proxy measure of the minimum value of the ecosystem services provided by Central Park. We present
7 April 2016
$500 billion as a reasonable estimate of the market value of Central Park as developable real estate. We
Accepted 8 April 2016
assume this $500 billion of natural capital converted to money could earn a 5% annual return ($25 Billion
per year). This return is an estimate of the value of annual ecosystem services provided by the 341 ha that
Keywords: constitute Central Park. This is over $70 million per hectare per year which is orders of magnitude higher
Green Infrastructure than the estimated value of ecosystem services provided by the most valuable biomes of previous es-
Urban Ecosystem Services
timates. The very high value of the ecosystem services provided by Central Park result from an inter-
Holistic Valuation
action of social, natural, human, and built capital. These interactions are poorly addressed from the
dominant economic worldview that governs social and environmental policy today. These findings also
suggest that the ‘up vs. out’ questions associated with sustainable urban development do not have simple
answers.
& 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.

1. Introduction interaction of natural, social, human, and built capital. We regard

‘Green Infrastructure’ (GI) is earning increased recognition as a
critical element of the urban environment because of the impacts
GI has on human well-being and urban ecology (Tzoulas et al.,
2007). Additionally, studies of GI raise some very fundamental and
provocative questions with respect to economic rationalism and
urban planning (Schaffler and Swilling, 2013; Laurans and Mermet,
2014). There are many differing definitions of GI (Young et al.,
2014) several of which are described here: (1) GI is about pre-
servation of natural urban environments via a suite of policies and
strategies to conserve land and biodiversity (Newell et al., 2013),
(2) GI is a worldview for maintaining and enhancing Ecological
Function in an urban network of energy, materials, and species
flows that provide benefits to human populations, (3) GI is viewed
from an engineering perspective which sees natural and built
networks as a part of the broader traditional infrastructure of the
urban environment (Spatari et al., 2011; Pucher et al., 2010), and
(4) GI is seen from the Ecological Economics perspective which
focuses on provision of ecosystem services that result from the
n
Corresponding author at: School of Natural and Built Environments, University
of South Australia, Australia.
E-mail addresses: Paul.Sutton@unisa.edu.au (P.C. Sutton),
sharolyn.anderson@unisa.edu.au (S.J. Anderson).
all of these definitions as useful; however, we feel the Ecological
Economics approach captures the very important idea of ‘inter-
action’ amongst natural, social, human, and built capital which
necessitates a holistic perspective for analysis and understanding
(Costanza et al., 2014). Here we adopt the idea that GI is the net-
work of green spaces and water systems that provide myriad en-
vironmental, economic, and social benefits to urban areas (Ely and
Pitman, 2012). We present an efficient and holistic approach to
economic valuation of these benefits using New York City's Central
Park as an iconic example of the natural capital associated with GI.
Green infrastructure is natural capital in the urban environ-
ment that provides valuable ecosystem services. The idea of eco-
system services is well established and there have been literally
thousands of peer-reviewed publications in which economic va-
luation of various ecosystem services have been performed
(Costanza; 2014). Triple bottom line (TBL) accounting (Elkington,
1997) suggests green infrastructure should be assessed from the
three perspectives of social, environmental, and economic ac-
counting (aka people, planet, and profit). The Millennium Eco-
system Assessment (MEA, 2005) argued for more of an ecosystem
service assessment perspective. The TBL and MEA approaches are
not incompatible; however, economic valuation from either per-
spective can be a formidable accounting task. Many ecosystem
services can be roughly classified into these TBL and MEA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2016.04.003
2212-0416/& 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.
88 P.C. Sutton, S.J. Anderson / Ecosystem Services 19 (2016) 87–91
categories. Ecosystem services typically associated with green in-
frastructure include: (1) Provisioning services such as food, water,
timber, and genetic resources; (2) Regulating services such as cli-
mate regulation, air and water filtration, and carbon sequestration;
(3) Cultural/Social services such as recreational, aesthetic, and
spiritual; and (4) Supporting services such as soil formation and
retention, nutrient cycling, and photosynthesis (De Groot et al.
2002). These general categories of ecosystem services don’t ne-
cessarily enable appreciation of the real and tangible value of the
specifically urban ecosystem services provided by GI (Young et al.
2014).
The challenging accounting task of estimating a dollar value for
urban ecosystem services derived from GI would likely include the
following:
1) Ecological Benefits Assessment: mitigation of urban heat is-
land effect, temperature moderation by urban vegetation
through evapotranspiration and shading (Zhang et al. 2014),
wind speed moderation, air quality improvement through
avoided emissions and pollutant removal, carbon sequestration,
storage, and avoided greenhouse gas emissions via cooling (Qiu
et al., 2013), reduced building energy use for heating and
cooling because of parks, green walls, roofs, and shading (Ca
et al. 1998), Hydrologic regulation via flow control and flood
reduction, water purification, waste decomposition and nutrient
cycling, noise level attenuation, biodiversity protection and
enhancement (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999).
2) Human Health and Well-being Benefits Assessment: im-
proved physical well-being from increased physical activity,
healthier food, healthier outdoor and indoor environments
(Wang et al., 2014), improved social well-being from increased
social interaction, social integration, community cohesion, and
improved mental well-being from biophilic responses to GI
(Takano et al., 2002).
3) Social and Cultural Benefits Assessment: food production
from urban agriculture (edible landscapes, community gardens,
etc.), opportunities for recreation and non-motorized transpor-
tation, improved socio-ecological resilience (Folke, 2006), ben-
efits of social interaction and community integrity, benefits of
connectivity of footpaths, sidewalks, and bike paths, integrated
public spaces for recreation-education-research activities, value
of sense of place and belonging, enhanced aesthetics via
enhancing desirable views and restricting undesirable views,
reduced social inequality through open access to desirable
public space (Wolch et al., 2014).
4) Marketed Economic Benefits Assessment: improved property
values and property tax revenues (McPhearson et al., 2013),
enhanced local economic activity, reduced health care costs as a
result of aforementioned human health and well-being benefits,
monetary value of saved energy and reduced CO2 emissions,
value of avoided construction and management costs of grey
infrastructure, avoided costs of flood damage, value of increased
use of non-motorized transportation (walking and cycling).
The aforementioned list of valuable benefits provided by green
infrastructure is both formidable and undoubtedly incomplete.
Conducting an economic valuation of each and every one of these
benefits would be an enormous task to complete for a large me-
tropolitan area and it is very likely that it would be an under-
estimate fraught with isolated calculations that each have un-
certainty and error associated with them and do not account for
significant interactions. Additionally, many of these services are
often complementary rather than substitutable (Ostrom, 2009;
Daly and Farley, 2011). For this reason we adopt a new approach of
‘holistic valuation’ to estimate the economic value of all of these
combined services which avoids many of these pitfalls and
challenges. Holistic valuation is in one sense a ‘revealed pre-
ference’ of the public at large. Some might argue we are using an
‘opportunity cost’ perspective for the collective rather than the
individual. The value of the ‘opportunity’ to sell off all of Central
Park for development is ‘revealed’ as not desired by the public by
the observation that selling off Central Park for development
would be unacceptable to the public at large.
2. Approach
Estimating the economic value of the ecosystem services pro-
vided by the natural capital of GI is a daunting task for numerous
reasons including questions of double counting, classification, and
spatial and temporal scale (De Groot et al., 2010). Consequently we
adopt an approach that bypasses and obviates almost all of these
complexities by simply estimating the market value of the real
estate occupied by Central Park in New York City and stating that
this is a legitimate and logical estimate of the minimum economic
value of the natural capital contained in Central Park. The logic is
this: the public wants Central Park to exist and would not support
any politician or political movement that argued for the sale and
privatization of the real estate that constitutes Central Park (at
least not at the current market value of the real estate) (S. Johanna
Robledo NY Magazine, 2015). This is a ‘revealed preference’ of the
public at large. Our ‘holistic valuation’ approach adopts the lan-
guage of ‘revealed preference’ often associated with ‘revealed
preference theory’ of neo-classical economics (Samuelson, 1938);
however, any analogy is weak for several reasons including: 1) the
non-sale of Central Park is a passive rather than an active act, 2)
Central Park is a public good and the benefits and utility of the
park or its potential sale are difficult to allocate accurately or co-
herently, 3) these are collective rather than individual decisions.
Despite these complexities we are confident that any proposals to
sell off Central Park to private interests and to use the proceeds of
such sale to reduce the taxes of the citizens of New York City
would be overwhelmingly rejected by the public. This idea enables
the following simplifying assumption: The market value of the real
estate of Central Park is a minimum estimate of the value of the
Natural Capital contained by Central Park. Using this assumption it
is a simple and straightforward task to estimate the dollar value of
the GI represented by Central Park and to estimate the dollar value
of the ecosystem services annually provided by Central Park.
Proceeding with this assumption leads us to questions of the
dollar value of real estate in Manhattan. We are comfortable with
order of magnitude errors in this particular case because the
numbers are so large that they raise provocative questions for any
reasonable estimate of the value of real estate in Manhattan. One
estimate of $528,783,552,000 (over half of a trillion dollars) for the
total value of the 843 acres of real estate in Central Park was
conducted by the property appraisal firm of Miller Samuel and
published in New York Magazine (S. Johanna Robledo NY Maga-
zine, 2015). There is spatial variation in the value of real estate in
all urban areas including Manhattan (Thunen and Hall, 1966). Mid-
town will have different values than the financial district which
will in turn have different values than Harlem. Central Park spans
enough area to undoubtedly capture some variation in per acre
values of real estate; nonetheless, the Miller Samuel estimate
produces an average per acre value of over $600 million. Another
estimate can be derived from a story about a property that was
destroyed by an explosion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on
east 62nd street (NYTimes, 2006). The house was leveled in an
explosion and had an appraised value of $6 million. The open land
without the structure was valued at $7 million and this was for an
area of less than 0.05 acres. This works out to over $140 million
per acre for a property which had a single family unit on it. This
 P.C. Sutton, S.J. Anderson / Ecosystem Services 19 (2016) 87–91 89

suggests that even if Central Park were zoned for single family
housing it would still have a value at well over a 100 billion dollars
(
$118,000,000,000).
Using the Miller Samuel estimate of $500 Billion as the market
value of Central Park as developable real estate provides an esti-
mate of the minimum value of the natural capital that Central Park
represents. Ecosystem services are the benefits that flow from the
ecological functions of natural capital. Central Park as GI clearly
provides many of the previously discussed ecosystem services that
result from the interaction of human, social, natural, and built
capital in New York City. To estimate the value of these ecosystem
services we assume a five percent return on investment of this
$500 Billion. This works out to $25 billion dollars a year. In other
words the ecosystem services provided by the natural capital of
Central Park provide $25 billion dollars’ worth of value to the ci-
tizens of New York every year as a public good. Given that Central
Park is roughly 341 ha of area this is over $73 million dollars per
hectare per year.

3. Discussion

An early estimate of the total value of the world's ecosystem

services produced a number of $33 trillion per year in 1997 which
was roughly twice the size of the global marketed economy at that
time (Costanza et al., 2001). A revised estimate was produced in
2014 which increased this estimate to $145 trillion per year
(Costanza et al. 2014). The world's land surfaces and associated
ecosystems do not have the same distribution they had in 1997
(e.g. roughly half the world's coral reefs are gone) nor are all these
ecosystems functioning at 100%. Changes in land cover that have
occurred in the last 15 years have resulted in a reduced estimate of
the total value of the world's ecosystem services to $125 trillion
per year. This represents a loss of roughly $20 trillion per year
because of land cover change alone and does not account for de-
graded ecological function that results from species extinction (e.g.
loss of pollination services) or land degradation (e.g. sea level rise,
soil salinization, desertification). This constitutes a loss of revenue
that is roughly one third of the world's market economy. Failure to
appropriately value ecosystem services is a massive market failure. Fig. 1. New York City's Central Park.
Fig. 1.
The sheer magnitude of the dollar value of ecosystem services
relative to the market economy combined with the market failure
nature of ecosystem services (e.g. the fact that they are public
goods, suffer from unclear property rights questions, and are af-
fected by both positive and negative externalities) raises many
questions as to whether economic rationalism is an appropriate
world view at all for developing environmental policy. In addition,
ecosystem services do not flow directly from natural capital to
improve human well-being but result from complex interactions of
human, social, natural and built capital that improve well-being
(Costanza et al. 2014) (Fig. 2). This economic valuation of urban
ecosystem services provided by the GI that is Central Park's natural
capital is a manifestation of this very point. Here we find that the
GI of Central Park provides urban ecosystem services that have a
value of at least $70 million dollars per hectare per year. The
highest annual per hectare values for ecosystem services in these
aforementioned studies were estimated for coral reefs ($352,249),
tidal marsh/mangroves ($193,845), and swamps and floodplains
Fig. 2. Human Well-being resulting from the interaction of human, built, social,
($25,682). Estimates of the value of urban ecosystems were only
and natural capital.
$6,661/ha/year (Fig. 3). Extending this valuation to the five bor-
oughs of New York City (Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, Man-
hattan, and Bronx) would result in a value of $19,710,000/ha/year This estimate of the value of urban ecosystem services is orders of
for the urban ecosystem services of New York City. This calculation magnitude larger than previous estimates and this calculation
is based on the area of the five boroughs of NYC at 790 km2 and provides evidence as to how important and powerful these in-
27% of this area is green infrastructure (McPhearson et al. 2014). teractions amongst human, social, built, and natural capital are. It
90 P.C. Sutton, S.J. Anderson / Ecosystem Services 19 (2016) 87–91
Fig. 3. Map of landcover of U.S. with associated annual ecosystem service value.
would be ludicrous to ‘value’ Central Park as a smattering of
grasses ($2,871/ha/year), forests ($3,013/ha/year), and lakes
($4,267/ha/year). Urban areas are characterized by the spatial in-
teraction of low levels of natural capital with very high levels of
built, social, and human capital due to population density. The
high economic values we are finding are the result of this inter-
action of relatively scarce natural capital with the nearby built,
human, and social capital. We are not presenting $19.7 million/ha/
year as a global value for urban ecosystem services. This value is
high because Central Park is an iconic and unique urban park in
one of the most densely populated and wealthy cities of the world.
However, the holistic valuation method can be used in cities
throughout the world. Applying this method to a diverse set of
cities with a range of geographic and demographic characteristics
will result in a spatially varying set of urban ecosystem service
values.
Human well-being is increased via an interaction of ecosystem
services with human, social, and built capital. The contribution of
the natural capital of Central Park to human well-being is in-
credibly large because Manhattan is a high concentration of hu-
man capital, social capital, and built capital with Central Park right
in the middle of it. Similarly, an interaction of calcium and vitamin
D supports strong bone development. Interactions can be very
complex and powerful factors. Ceteris Paribus assumptions so
common in economic analyses often fail to capture interactions
and can embed a hubris in these analyses that we may deeply
regret. The 2006 Stern report on the economics of climate change
stated “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has
ever seen, and it interacts with other market imperfections” (Stern,
2006). Climate change is also interacting with ecosystem function
and ecosystem services and the complexity of these problems
demands more than ‘market based solutions’ or calls for privati-
zation. If Central Park were to be privatized by divvying up the
parkland to private land holders as it currently exists it would
undoubtedly be sold off and developed. Would such a transfor-
mation please urban planners who seek increased urban density?
Green infrastructure is a public good and presents the chal-
lenges typically associated with optimal provision of public goods.
However, green infrastructure exists as both private and publicly
held land in urban environments. In Australia privately held green
spaces are continuously being subdivided as lot splits resulting in
what is being called ‘The Death of the Australian Back Yard’ (Hall,
2010). These lot splits can result in increasing impervious surfaces
in urban environments that may cross tipping points with respect
to capacity for flood mitigation and water retention. Ironically
these subdivisions are often encouraged and subsidized by local
and state governments because it encourages urban infill and
densification that is regarded as a positive move toward increased
urban sustainability by planners. Recent papers have made
‘economy of scale’ arguments suggesting that larger and denser
cities are more efficient because denser settlement leads to a more
intense use of infrastructure (Bettencourt and West, 2010). Do
these studies suggest that Central Park should be paved over to ac-
commodate an even higher density in Manhattan for the purpose of
even greater efficiency? We regard the ‘Up vs. Out’ question re-
garding urban growth to be somewhat of a red herring and agree
with the opinions of Chris Ives and Cecily Maller of RMIT Uni-
versity (http://theconversation.com/growing-out-versus-filling-
in-how-about-we-all-grow-up-12798 ).
The dichotomy between urban sprawl and urban densification is
false. More worryingly, it hinders our ability to make decisions for
creating sustainable, healthy and equitable cities of the future.
Cities are highly complex and multifaceted socio-ecological sys-
tems, and an equally sophisticated decision-making framework is
required to plan their future. Ultimately, we need to move past the
tired debate about one urban form versus another. A new dis-
cussion based on desired end states for urban sustainability must
be started. Rather than a one-size-fits all solution, special atten-
tion should be given to the spatial and unique requirements of the
people, species, and ecosystems that comprise cities. With this
starting point, we can transcend the current stalemate to ensure
our cities are planned and designed to meet the sustainability
challenges of the future.
The ongoing debate about the ‘Up vs. Out’ development of cities
seems to tilt weakly toward supporting infill and densification;
however, Shlomo Angel, in his book ‘Planet of Cities’, makes a
compelling argument that this debate is not over nor is it that
simple (Angel, 2012). Indeed, there is a growing recognition that
we need to develop a much better understanding of the urbani-
zation process because cities are where the driving forces of global
change come from; and, how our cities develop from this point on
will be critical determinants as to whether the human experiment
will or will not chart a path to a sustainable and desirable future.
Perhaps the idea of establishing a desired end-state might include
improving human well-being as a primary objective of urban life
rather than an efficiency defined by economic rationalism (Ku-
biszewski et al., 2013).
There is a growing call for the establishment of a ‘Science of
Urbanization’ that progresses urban studies toward a more sys-
tematic understanding of cities that captures these complexities
(Solecki et al., 2013). The idea that the ecosystem services of New
York City's Central Park provide a minimum value worth over $70
million/hectare/year suggests that there are some compelling
reasons to develop a new urbanization science that can see the
immense and real values that exist beyond the horizons of eco-
nomic rationalism.
 P.C. Sutton, S.J. Anderson / Ecosystem Services 19 (2016) 87–91
4. Conclusion
We present ‘holistic valuation’ as a method for determining a
minimum value of the ecosystem services derived from urban
parks. We use Central Park in New York City as a case study. The
natural capital embodied in Central Park is iconic green infra-
structure (GI) for the city of New York that provides a complex
suite of ecosystem services (McPhearson et al. 2014). Central Park
has a market value as developable real estate of roughly $500
billion. We use this number as an estimate of the minimum value
of the natural capital of central park based on the argument that
the public does not want to sell off Central Park, convert the
proceeds to cash, and reduce their taxes by the revenue that cash
could generate. This ‘holistic valuation’ approach to the economic
valuation of ecosystem services simplifies the formidable ac-
counting task of summing the myriad individual ecosystem ser-
vices provided by the GI of Central Park. In terms of ecosystem
services this represents roughly $25 billion per year which is over
$70 million per hectare per year. Applying this estimate of $70
million/ha/year for the GI of Central Park to all of the green in-
frastructure of NYC results in an estimate of urban ecosystem
services for all of NYC that is roughly $20 million/ha/year. This
value is orders of magnitude higher than previous estimates of
urban ecosystem service values ($6,661/ha/year). These high va-
lues result from spatial interactions of human, natural, social, and
built capital that support theoretical frameworks using ideas of
socio-ecological systems (Costanza et al., 2001). These frameworks
call for new institutions to better manage common pool resources
at varying spatial scales including green infrastructure (local) and
the atmosphere (global) (McPhearson, 2014; Holling, 2001). This
study contributes evidence to support the provocative and chal-
lenging questions surrounding the utility of the traditional neo-
classical economic world view with respect to governance, en-
vironmental policy, and sustainability.
Acknowledgements
We would also like to thank Martino Pesaresi and other
members of the steering committee of the ‘Human Planet’ in-
itiative that is part of the GEO Strategic Plan. This work was in-
spired and supported by the Global Human Settlement Layer
working group and the subsequent ‘Human Planet’ initiative that
partially resulted from it. Support from the University of South
Australia is gratefully acknowledged via the Research Themes In-
vestment Scheme program. In addition we would like to thank the
anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive suggestions on
the manuscript.
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