Urban green space exposure is low and unequally distributed in an Amazonian metropolis

Abstract

Urban green spaces are important for interactions between people and non-human nature, with their associated health and well-being impacts, although their distribution is often unequal. Here, we characterize the distribution of urban green spaces in Belém, the largest city in the Amazon Delta, and relate it to levels of human development and social vulnerability across the city; this is the first such analysis to be conducted for a Brazilian Amazon city. We first conducted a supervised maximum likelihood classification of images at 5–m spatial resolution taken in 2011 by the RapidEye satellites to map the distribution of green space across the urban part of the municipality of Belém. We then calculated two measures of urban green space at the level of human development units: the proportional cover of vegetation (Vegetation Cover Index; VCI) and the area of vegetation per person (Vegetation Cover per Inhabitant; VCPI), and we used hurdle models to relate them to two measures of socioeconomic status: the Social Vulnerability Index and the Human Development Index, as well as to demographic density. We find that VCI and VCPI are higher in more socially vulnerable areas. We explain how this pattern is driven by historical and ongoing processes of urbanization, consider access to urban green space and the benefits to human health and well-being and discuss equitable planning of urban green space management in the Amazon. We conclude that the assumption that urban greening will bring health benefits risks maintaining the status quo in terms of green exclusion and repeating historical injustices via displacement of socially vulnerable residents driven by demand for access to urban green spaces.