Tracking global urban green space trends

Urban green space - the presence of vegetation-covered area within cities' boundaries - is an increasingly relevant indicator for evaluating sustainable cities. This is because besides providing a set of local services such as mitigating the urban heat island effect and reducing the impact of extreme precipitation events, urban green space has been widely associated with increasing well-being of urban dwellers. Here we present a global analysis of recent trends in urban green space based on modelling of multi-spectral satellite imagery data to reproduce street-based vegetation presence indicators. We estimate local to continental trends over the 2016-2022 period and estimate global scale (considering a large set of the most populated cities) urban green space change statistical trends. We examine heterogeneities in the direction and magnitude of trends across cities and regions, while also analysing within-city inequalities. Our analysis provides an updated picture of urban green space across world cities and an open-source and open data-driven, spatially cross-validated approach to assess changes in near-real-time.