protected-area-based conservation [25].
While there has been an increasing realization of the
dependency of humans on ecosystem services [44], this realization does not seem to have had an
extensive influence in national or regional policy positions on urbanization in Africa. One reason for
this is that, although the regional interest in knowledge about ecological landscapes in urban areas is
growing [45, 46], both conservation scholarship and practice still largely ignore urban areas and fail
to see them as integral parts of the landscape. One exception is South Africa where the concept of
ecosystem services has been put to use both at the national and sub-national level to explore
strategies for sustainable water resource management [47]. One of the sub-national projects focus
on Olifants Grassland Catchment that includes major urban centers and heavy industry but is also
home to Kruger National Park. In this project, scenario analysis and green-infrastructure planning
were employed to simultaneously manage demand for water and preserve biodiversity by giving
explicit attention to ecosystem services. The challenges that urban areas in Africa are facing are
among the biggest in the world. The provision of basic urban services has already been lacking across
most cities on the continent even before the latest surge in urbanization. The reasons for poor
governance and inadequate service infrastructure in urban areas can be traced back to colonial
institutional arrangements and persistent political instability [25]. Some African countries do not
have any urban planning and development departments while the rigid zoning in central areas of
many cities inadvertently contribute to proliferation of slums and sprawling development of
residential areas [25]. The social problems are liable to further deteriorate as the demand for
services and the cost for delivery both rise jeopardizing achieving even the minimum targets of the
Millennium Development Goals. Under these conditions, it is especially hard for the responsible
agencies to put due emphasis on biodiversity conservation even though there are practical reasons
for urban planning and governance to heed conservation of the habitats and biodiversity [48].
Studies on the interactions among biodiversity, ecosystem services, and urbanization conclude that
they are multifaceted and elude simplification [49, 50]. This complexity poses both opportunities and
challenges for conservation in urban landscapes. While it is hard to accurately value the services
provided by ecosystems there are promising developments towards valuation of these resources to
inform their sustainable and equitable management [51]. One problem in the case of African cities,
as in most other developing country cities, is the lack of data to generate these monetary valuation
estimates [52]. A more fundamental problem is that many of these services are common or public
goods. This means that benefits they provide are not necessarily limited to those who can pay for
them, but are typically freely available to a larger group [48]. Conservation has implications for
ecosystem services [53]. African cities can benefit from ecosystem services such as provision of clean
air and water while developing their economies [9]. In this sense, riparian zones can serve as critical
parts of green infrastructure for purposes such as protection from floods, provision of recreational
spaces, and cleaning water while safeguarding biodiversity. Including riparian zones along with
non-riparian areas within a system of urban parks is especially important to reflect maximum
heterogeneity in native vegetation types [54]. Therefore, valuation of services provided by these
ecosystems need to be given due attention in urban development initiatives [55]. The potential value
of biodiversity and ecosystem services as foundations for a green infrastructure to meet the
demands of urban residents has been showcased in a study on Johannesburg [52]. In this sense,
urban agricultural plots can be used to increase green cover and enrich biodiversity in urban areas
while improving