Urban ecosystem services and economic valuation stages in public green space: Indirect usage value of Validebağ Korusu

With the rapidly increasing urbanization, the importance of public green spaces for the quality of life and well-being of the city residents becomes more prominent. Decreased green areas with the increase of urbanization directly affect the urban ecosystem service and managing urban ecosystem services is of critical importance for social and ecological sustainability. Succeeding in applying functioning ecosystems in the urban environment will be protected from climate change and so on. While providing flexibility against the difficulties that may arise, it also offers great opportunities for people living in the city in terms of socio-cultural aspects. Understanding the services offered by nature to people and calculating their economic values has become an important issue on a local, regional and global scale, but it is clear that these quantified services will contribute to sustainable development by integrating them into the policy and decision-making process. But there are some difficulties in valuing ecosystem services. These difficulties are both due to the difficulty of obtaining accurate data on ecosystem processes and functions, and the fact that the applied economic valuation techniques involve a more complex process compared to other methods. The study and similar studies carried out within the scope of this thesis gain importance in terms of bringing the subject to the agenda and contributing to future studies. This scope of work; It is planned to determine urban ecosystem services, service classes within ecosystem services, methods for calculating the economic values of same time, a study has been carried out on how to look at ecosystem services, which are given economic value, from an ethical point of view. For this plan, it has been determined as the study area of "Validebağ Korusu", which has an important place in terms of Istanbul in terms of its ecological and cultural characteristics. The contribution of "Koru" to urban ecosystem services and its indirect use value have been tried to be revealed. The main purpose of the research is; revealing the contribution and economic value of public green spaces to urban ecosystem services, and also planning a method for the economic valuation of indirect use values. However, despite the lack of qualitative and quantitative data in this study; (i) the contribution of urban ecosystem services to urban life, (ii) contributing to the Turkish literature on the economic valuation of urban ecosystem services, (iii) encouraging new research and discussions, (iv) to contribute and support further studies, (v) to include an ethical perspective when looking at ecosystem services and economic valuation studies.