2.2.3Active indicatorUrban Green and Blue Spaces
2.1Assessment and planning of health adaptation
2.2Enabling conditions, adaptation delivery, and implementation
2.3Vulnerabilities, health risk, and resilience to climate change
Indicator 2.2.3 · Adaptation
Urban Green and Blue Spaces
Increasing urban green and blue spaces (vegetation and bodies of water, respectively) represent nature-based solutions that offers multiple benefits to climate change adaptation for health. Urban green and blue spaces provide local cooling, disrupting urban heat islands and reducing heat exposure, and can reduce the risk of urban floods by reducing water runoff and offering reservoirs. Additionally, exposure to urban green spaces provide direct benefits to human health by reducing, exposure to air and noise pollution, providing a setting for social interaction and physical activity, improving mental health, and reducing all-cause mortality. . This indicator tracks the availability of green and blue spaces in urban areas around the world.
Headline finding
In 2025, exposure to urban greenspace remained broadly stable globally, increasing by less than 1% compared with the 2015–2017 average, with individual city changes ranging from −52.2% to +48.7%.
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Figure 1
Urban Green and Blue Space
This indicator measures exposure to urban greenness using population-weighted peak-season Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which uses satellite data to estimate vegetation coverage at the peak of the season with highest coverage. It shows greenness and percentage of green and/or bluespace coverage for cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, and the average urban greenness by country or city.
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Figure 2
Urban Green Space
Exposure to green space in urban areas, measured using the population-weighted Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), shown globally and by country, Human Development Index group, WHO region and Lancet Countdown region, from 2015 to 2025.
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About this indicator
Description
This indicator reports population-weighted Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as a proxy for green space exposure in 1,042 urban centres across 174 countries that have more than 500,000 inhabitants or are the most populous centres in countries unrepresented by the 500,000 threshold, as identified by the Global Human Settlement programme of the European Commission. Green space is detected through remote sensing of green vegetation, making use of the satellite-based NDVI.
Data downloads
Caveats
This indicator does not provide information on quality or type of green space, nor on its accessibility. In tracking urban areas as defined by the Global Human Settlement Program, this indicator does not focus on administrative city boundaries, but rather on effective urban developments. Missing values from the GHS or Landsat data due to cloud cover or other factors limit the generalisability of the findings.
Data sources
- Global Human Settlement Programme of the European Commission (GHS) used to identify urban centers.
- Population size identified from JRC GHSL.
- Satellite data were downloaded from the publicly available Landsat satellite, a joint program of the US Geological Survey and NASA.
- MODIS landcover data set.
- Global climate regions from the Köppen Climate Classification System.