This article develops an integrated framework linking ecosystem services to urban-metabolism assessment. It addresses the limited representation of urban ecosystems in material-flow accounts, where ecological contributions may appear only as external inputs or background conditions.

The framework extends economy-wide material-flow accounting by connecting pressures and drivers to ecosystem-service supply and demand. It distinguishes natural and social capital and uses interdisciplinary literature analysis, including text-mining and natural-language-processing techniques, to organise the relevant concepts and indicators.

The contribution establishes a dynamic baseline for evaluating how ecosystems support urban resource use and wellbeing. It is the conceptual foundation of UMaNS and later nature-based-solutions research in Lima, Brussels, Ghana and healthcare environments.