An assessment of the ecosystem services content of green plans as an evaluation proxy for the delivery of urban green infrastructure

To facilitate well-being and health amongst urban populations, there is a need for urban spatial plans to promote sustainable development, leading to considerable interest and practice related to the delivery of urban green infrastructure (UGI). One approach for delivering UGI is through the adoption of green plans. However, green plans vary considerably in their structure and content, and there is a pressing need to evaluate whether green plans incorporate the necessary range of ecosystem services (ES). In this paper, we adopt an existing evaluation method using coding to determine the extent to which ES are embedded explicitly and implicitly in green plans. We apply this to a unique situation of the Brazilian city of S˜ ao Paulo which has four separate green plans (investigating each plan individually for potential ES delivery) and adapt the method to separate the rhetoric of plans from their tangible actions in order to get closer to an analysis of ES outcomes. The four green plans that make up the green area system present greater or lesser participation and intensity of the ES concept which can influence the UGI implementation. However, the analysis comparing the content and discursive representation of each green plan with its respective plan actions showed, except for one of the four plans, that the delivery of ES through the green plans focuses more on rhetoric than action. To deliver the desired UGI for ensuring urban sustainability, green plans must not only mention ES in their content but should embed ES in their plan actions.