With climate change and urbanization, city planners and developers have increasing interest and practice in constructing, restoring, or incorporating wetlands as forms of green infrastructure to maintain water-related ecosystem services (WES). We reviewed studies that valued in functional or monetary units the water regulation and purification services of urban wetlands around the globe. We used the adaptive management cycle (AMC) as a heuristic to determine the step that a study would represent in the AMC, the connections between the cycle steps that were used or considered, and the stakeholders involved. Additionally, we identified the social, ecological, and/or technological dimension(s) of the environmental stressors and management strategies described by study authors. While use-inspired research on WES occurs throughout the globe, most studies serve to singularly assess problems or monitor urban wetlands, consider or use no connectors between steps, and involve no stakeholder groups. Both stressors and strategies were overwhelmingly multidimensional, with the social dimension represented in the majority of both. We highlight studies that successfully interfaced with cities across multiple steps, connectors, engaged stakeholder groups, and disseminated findings and skills to stakeholder groups. True use-inspired research should explicitly involve management systems that are used by city stakeholders and propose multidimensional solutions.

Worldwide, coastal and floodplain wetlands are rapidly urbanizing, making them highly vulnerable to biodiversity loss, biological invasion and climate change. Yet urban wetlands management is an understudied area of global environmental research. Different policy approaches and institutional arrangements in place for urban wetlands governance have to be studied comparatively to obtain a better understanding of the current issues. This paper investigates four urban wetland policy regimes and the application of ecological reference points across four countries. The regimes are discussed within the context of global policy trends, urbanization patterns and environmental change. The analysis illustrates that the four cases deviate substantially in certain characteristics and converge in others. Global trends such as environmental treaties and restructuring of city spaces are common policy drivers for all cases. Conversely, the localized specific problems have yielded specialized policy responses in each case. Declaration of fixed biological reference points for wetlands were not used at any stage of the policy development process. However, the wetland managers formally or informally set up ecosystem-services oriented benchmarks for urban wetland management. Globally-applicable normative policy directives or universal ecological reference points seem bound to fail in urban wetlands governance. However, in designing effective urban wetland policy and institutions at the regional scale, both context-specific and generalized lessons from empirical policy evaluation of multiple case studies need to be jointly considered. Based on the characteristics of the policy regimes analysed in this study, a hypothetical framework for urban wetland policy evaluation is proposed; this has yet to be validated by empirical application to actual cases.