Tracking progress towards urban nature targets using landcover and
vegetation indices: A global study for the 96 C40 Cities
Abstract
Access to urban natural space, including blue and greenspace, is
associated with improved health. In 2021, the C40 Cities Climate
Leadership Group set 2030 Urban Nature Declaration (UND) targets:
“Quality Total Cover” (30% green area within each city) and
“Equitable Spatial Distribution” (70% of the population living close
to natural space). We evaluate progress towards these targets in the 96
C40 cities using globally available, high-resolution datasets for
landcover and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). We use the
European Space Agency (ESA)’s WorldCover dataset to define greenspace
with discrete landcover categories and ESA’s Sentinel-2A to calculate
NDVI, adding the ‘open water’ landcover category to characterize total
natural space. We compare 2020 levels of urban green and natural space
to the two UND targets and predict the city-specific NDVI level
consistent with the UND targets using linear regressions. The 96-city
mean NDVI was 0.538 (range: 0.148, 0.739). Most (80%) cities meet the
Quality Total Cover target, and nearly half (47%) meet the Equitable
Spatial Distribution target. Landcover-measured greenspace and total
natural space were strong (mean R2 = 0.826) and moderate (mean R2=0.597)
predictors of NDVI and our NDVI-based natural space proximity measure,
respectively. The 96-city mean predicted NDVI value of meeting the UND
targets was 0.478 (range: 0.352-0.565) for Quality Total Cover and 0.660
(range: 0.498-0.767) for Equitable Spatial Distribution. Our translation
of the area- and access-based metrics common in urban natural space
targets into the NDVI metric used in epidemiology allows for quantifying
the health benefits of achieving such targets.