The Economic Evaluation of Water Ecosystem Services in Urban Planning in Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan

With the positive and negative consequences of rapid global urbanization, the main task of the state is to ensure the long term quality of life of its citizens. Currently, reforms undertaken by post-Soviet states aimed at environment-related projects are facing increasing resistance and protest from local populations. In 2020, the authors of this paper carried out a study on the Maly Taldykol lake group, located in the south-western planning region of Nur-Sultan. The purpose of this work was to conduct an assessment of ecosystem services to inform effective management decisions in urban planning. A strategy of combined research methods was applied. Because of the lack of data, the challenge was to explain, summarize, and verify the data obtained by one method through the application of another method. Analysis of the data showed that the annual costs associated with the creation of artificial “islands of nature” through the expansion of green areas is 20 times less than the losses associated with the development of the territory of Maloe Taldykol and the consequential loss of natural landscape. The results revealed that keeping these ecosystem services in their natural setting reduces the cost of providing these services in an alternative way, and avoids the negative impact of an ill-conceived decision. The uniqueness of this interdisciplinary study lies in the cost-benefit analysis of the findings of the assessment of ecosystem services, which result in the most effective management decisions in urban planning.