Green Spaces for Climate-Smart City

Green spaces play a critical role in improving environmental quality in urban areas. It acts as a carbon sink that reduces the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, mitigating the Urban Heat Island Effect as well as reducing air pollution, providing shade/cooling, rainwater catchment and biodiversity support. Green spaces also greatly benefit the health and wellbeing of urban inhabitants as it serves as additional recreational space, a support to local urban agriculture and even increases property value. To ensure gaining the potential of green space benefit, Un Habitat suggested cities pay attention to several factors.

First, the minimum quantitative standards to ensure the green spaces are accessible to everyone. WHO recommends a minimum of 9sqm for each person and at least 0.5-1 ha within 300m or five minutes of walking distance. Next, cities must improve the equity of these green space spatial distributions. The low-income neighbourhood often ends up with less park areas, increasing their vulnerability to heatwaves and landslides. Lastly, it is encouraged to integrate the green infrastructure with the blue infrastructure such as lakes, floodplains, wetlands, canals, rivers, etc) to maximize the benefit to the ecosystem. The integration between the two can improve water quality and reduce noise. The network between green and blue infrastructures also allows the complete water cycle to occur within the city and enhance flood management in the area. 

Reference:

Urban Planning Law for Climate Smart Cities: The Urban Law Module of the Law and Climate Change Toolkit by UN Habitat