Abstract
City green infrastructure (CGI) makes cities more resilient and sustainable, as required by the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goal 11–Sustainable Cities and Communities. Based on the CGI policies of Beijing, land use/land cover (LULC) changes of two Asian capitals, Beijing, China and Islamabad, Pakistan, are simulated. LULC maps for 2010 and 2015 are developed by applying object-based image analysis (OBIA) to Landsat imagery. Dynamics of land system (DLS) model was used to simulate the LULC changes for 2020 and 2025 under three scenarios: (1) business-as-usual (BAU); (2) urban green space work plan (UGWP); and (3) landscape and greening policies (LGP). Results reveal that DLS is efficient than other simulation models. The BAU scenario predicts an overall expansion in Beijing’s greenery, while Islamabad will encounter a decline by 7.3 km2 per year. Under the UGWP scenario, urban green spaces and other vegetation area of Beijing will expand by 7.6 km2, while, for Islamabad, vegetation degradation rate will slow down to 6.9 km2 per year. The LGP scenario envisage a massive increase of 23.5 km2 per year in green resources of Beijing and Islamabad’s green land loss rate will further slowdown to 6.1 km2 per year. It is inferred from the results that vegetation degradation in Islamabad need to lessen by implementing LGP policy after basic amendments according to the local conditions and available resources.
Highlights
Half of humanity (3.5 billion people) are living in cities, and by 2030 almost 60% of the world’s population will live in urban areas
Results of the current study indicate that landscape and greening policies (LGP) is the most effective policy in improving the City green infrastructure (CGI) of Beijing; which coincides with conclusions of Li et al (2016) [43]
Results of Islamabad indicate a high rate of vegetation degradation during time interval of 2010–2015
Summary
Half of humanity (3.5 billion people) are living in cities, and by 2030 almost 60% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Goal 11 of the SDGs is “Sustainable Cities and Communities”; to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable [1]. Both land use and land cover (LULC) are basic components of environmental changes around the globe. It directly influences human society, ecology and Earth’s climate [2]. The critical process of rapid urbanization is transforming the natural vegetation of cities into residential and industrial land that leads to serious environmental and ecological problems [6,7]; such as urban heat islands (UHI) [8,9,10], air pollution [11,12,13] and biodiversity loss [14,15]. Vegetation plays a vital role in urban regions from different prospects, i.e., maintaining ecological balance, protecting biodiversity, alleviating thermal impacts and improving quality of living conditions [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]
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