Holistic valuation of urban ecosystem services in New York City's Central Park

•Holistic valuation methodology presented for urban ecosystem service valuation.•The value of urban ecosystem services provided by Central Park is over $70 million per hectare per year.•Value of urban ecosystems is very high due to interaction of human, social, built, and natural capital.•New institutions are required to address failures of neo-classical economic paradigm with respect to governance, environmental policy, and sustainability.

Central Park is iconic Green Infrastructure that provides myriad ecosystem services to New York City that have significant economic value. We used the market value of Central Park as developable real estate as a proxy measure of the minimum value of the ecosystem services provided by Central Park. We present $500 billion as a reasonable estimate of the market value of Central Park as developable real estate. We assume this $500 billion of natural capital converted to money could earn a 5% annual return ($25 Billion per year). This return is an estimate of the value of annual ecosystem services provided by the 341 ha that constitute Central Park. This is over $70 million per hectare per year which is orders of magnitude higher than the estimated value of ecosystem services provided by the most valuable biomes of previous estimates. The very high value of the ecosystem services provided by Central Park result from an interaction of social, natural, human, and built capital. These interactions are poorly addressed from the dominant economic worldview that governs social and environmental policy today. These findings also suggest that the ‘up vs. out’ questions associated with sustainable urban development do not have simple answers.