Learning for Resilience: Embedding Ecosystem Services Literacy Across Disciplines to Support Sustainable Urban Futures

Cities face increasing pressures from climate change, biodiversity loss, and accelerating urban expansion, making informed management of urban green infrastructure (UGI) essential for climate adaptation, public health, and long-term urban resilience. While UGI provides vital ecosystem services (ES), stakeholders, particularly university students as future planners, administrators, and civic actors, often have uneven understandings of their contributions to urban well-being and to evidence-based environmental governance. This case study examines how students from diverse academic disciplines perceive ES in Băneasa Forest, an urban forest in Bucharest exposed to development pressures, and engage in sustainability-related decision-making within a contested urban land-use context. Disciplinary background strongly shapes initial understandings and conservation priorities, reflecting knowledge asymmetries that parallel real-world governance dynamics between ecological experts, administrative sectors, and sociocultural stakeholders, yet a brief, targeted educational intervention improves conceptual clarity, ecological literacy, and willingness to participate in civic and service-learning initiatives. Notably, gains in the recognition of regulating and supporting services highlight the potential of interdisciplinary education to strengthen the cognitive foundations required for precautionary and ecosystem-based urban governance. By demonstrating how ES frameworks can foster interdisciplinary learning and informed action in a real metropolitan environmental context, this study offers a transferable model for integrating UNESCO-aligned Education for Sustainable Development into higher education curricula while simultaneously enhancing institutional capacity for cross-sectoral collaboration in urban forest management. In doing so, it positions universities as active intermediaries at the science–policy–society interface, contributing to more resilient and participatory urban environmental governance.