Ecosystem services and green infrastructure planning: a method for the Metropolitan City of Cagliari (Italy)

Humans have significant impacts on landscapes, which are increasingly fragmented. In the context of a changing climate, natural disasters such as floodings and landslides contribute to increasing the fragility of rural, peri-urban and urban landscapes. In this regard, green infrastructure (GI) is considered a suitable solution to help mitigating landscape fragmentation and increasing disaster resilience. So, landscape planning and management can introduce GI-based solutions into a variety of plans with the purpose of supplying a wide range of ecosystem services (ESs). In this work, we propose and apply a method for assessing the effectiveness of GI in the Metropolitan City of Cagliari (MCC), Italy. We assess the ability of GI to provide MCC with a set of ESs that enhance the resilience of local landscapes to address the effects of climate change. The approach demonstrated outstanding viability, with the selected GI for the MCC proving to be extremely effective.