A Shrinking Green Dot

A thought provoking article from Jennifer Leber from Journal Watch.conservationmagazine.org on March 3.

The urban jungle could become more concrete and less green as people flock to live in cities at an ever accelerating pace, a study in Biology Letters finds.
Green space in European cities varies widely – from 11 percent in Birmingham, U.K. to 39 percent in Stockholm, Sweden – but few studies have taken a birds-eye view at the data to look for a trend. Analyzing green space, city area size, and population across 386 cities, the authors found that as a city got physically larger, the relative proportion of green turf grew. By contrast, the more densely populated a city, the less access to nature each person had. The result: residents of compact, dense cities most suffered a lack of green in their lives. As governments implement policies to limit sprawl and increase urban density, they could be doing so at a cost to urban biodiversity and ecosystem services, not to mention the social, physical, and psychological benefits of living green. – Jessica Leber