Systematic land use planning for ecological sustainability does not typically include human health and well-being as explicit inputs. We test the effects of including issues related to human health, ecosystem services, and community wellbeing on the outputs of a standard land use planning process which is primarily focused on environmental variables. We interview regional stakeholders to identify the health issues that have environmental links in the Sacramento, California region and to identify potential indicators and datasets that can be used to assess and track these issues. Formal ontologies describe the relationships between individuals, organizations, sustainability issues, indicators, datasets, and legal mandates that influence sustainability planning in the region. Marxan planning software identifies efficient land use patterns to maximize both ecological conservation and human health outcomes. Economic valuation of ecosystem services and health indicators associated with alternate land use patterns allow comparisons between these land use scenarios. Economic valuation of ecosystem services is an attempt to quantify changes in people’s well-being - as measured by their own preferences - due to incremental changes in their environments.
Results/Conclusions
We assembled a database of 780 environment- and health-related actors of particular relevance in the region including organizational affiliation and areas of expertise. This was developed into an “expertise ontology.” Health-focused issues, indicators, and datasets were integrated with a growing Environment Issues and Indicators ontology representing classes of regional environmental information. Interviews, online searches, and other information were used to assemble an ontology of people, projects, organizations, and datasets. Finally, a “mandates & guidelines” ontology was developed to formally track the linkages from policies and guidelines to regional sustainability issues and data. Encoding these data and information sources into interlinked ontologies permits query across multiple entry points and perspectives. A focus of the resulting databases and ontologies was the linkage of U.S. EPA tools and data to the region. For example, data found in EnviroAtlas were linked to regional sustainability issues to provide capacity to identify useful data sources in regional sustainability assessments. Marxan outputs were derived for four different land use scenarios that varied in thematic focus. Ecosystem service valuations explicitly quantified trade-offs between scenarios. Preliminary results indicate likely co-benefits to be realized for both ecological and human health outcomes when both are included in regional planning processes.