Spatio-temporal changes in urban green space in 107 Chinese cities (1990–2019): The role of economic drivers and policy

Urban green space (UGS) has gained increasing attention due to its environmental and social functions. However, the compound effects of climate change, population growth and economic development on UGS are largely unknown. We selected 107 medium-sized and large cities in China to investigate dynamics in the spatial pattern of UGS in relation to government policy and other drivers based on remote sensing data for the period 1990 to 2019. To explore the effect of different levels of urbanization on changes in green space, we develop a new Normalized Urban Development Index (NUDI) to classify urban-suburban-rural gradients, viz. Long-term Built-up, New Built-up and Non-Built-up. Then, we analysed changes over time in the annual peak value of fraction of vegetation cover (FVC) for 380,000 cloud-free Landsat images, and regional UGS dynamics were evaluated using the proposed Regional Greenness Dynamic Index (RGDI). Finally, to reveal the major driver(s) of changes in UGS and estimate the extent to which patterns of urban greening are due to differences in economic development, we compared the observed UGS spatio-temporal dynamics with data on several climatic, social-economic and land use related factors for the same period.