Ecosystem services are goods and services of direct or indirect benefit to humans that are produced by ecosystem processes involving the interaction of living elements, such as vegetation and soil organisms, and non-living elements, such as bedrock, water, and air.

Ecosystem services PlanGreen can help you achieve include:

• Manage water on the site to imitate natural water cycles
• Plant appropriate vegetation strategically to cool the area, filter water, and provide habitat
• Restore soils to support healthy vegetation and filter pollutants
• Select sustainable materials to protect human health.

PlanGreen has long advocated the central message of the soon to be new rating system, the Sustainable Sites Initiative “that any landscape—whether the site of a large subdivision, a shopping mall, a park, an abandoned rail yard, or even one home—holds the potential both to improve and to regenerate the natural benefits and services provided by ecosystems in their undeveloped state.”

PlanGreen can help you get ahead of the curve with the forthcoming rating system—Sustainable Sites. PlanGreen can help you persuade decision-makers that the cost of changing conventional methods of landscape design, development, and maintenance is not only money well spent, but also critical in addressing the challenges climate change is bringing with it. We will help them shape policies that take into account the full direct and indirect economic value of the goods and services produced by a healthy environment and consider the economic consequences of an impaired ecosystem.

For decision-makers who are committed to taking into account ecosystem services, we can help you develop policies and programs to do so. We also partner with design firms to achieve designs that utilize ecosystem services.