Ecosystem services and the nexus for achieving urban sustainability

Urbanization drives enormous resource flows - e.g., water, energy and food (WEF) - and ecosystem services that are vital for humanity, but challenged by global environmental changes such as climate change and socioeconomic uncertainties. Addressing these challenges requires approaches and frameworks considering both in- and transboundary urban WEF interactions and their interlinkages with ecosystem services to harness synergies, mitigate undesirable tradeoffs, and improve urban resilience to future environmental changes. To this end, in this perspective, we elaborate the 'Desirable Operating Space' (DOS) framework that reconciles WEF Nexus, ecosystem services, resilience thinking, and cross-scale dynamics. We first briefly review foundational concepts and theories contributing to DOS framework, and then elucidate scales on which DOS could be investigated. Further, we discuss approaches for operationalizing DOS framework for urban WEF Nexus that account for its linkages with ecosystem services. Going beyond, we argue that this framework could be applicable to other resource and service sectors (e.g., climate, health, waste, emission) and their interactions, and conclude with questions pertaining to urban sustainability that are addressable with DOS.