Spatiotemporal Evolution of Residential Exposure to Green Space in Beijing

Urban green space has a critical impact on the urban ecological environment, residents’ health, and urban sustainability. Quantifying residential exposure to green space and proposing targeted enhancement strategies in urban areas is helpful to rationally plan urban green space construction, reduce the inequality in residential exposure to green space, and promote environmental equity. However, the long-time evolution analysis of residential exposure to green space at different scales and the influence of green space quality on residential exposure to green space are rarely reported. Here we produced a long-time series dataset of urban green space from 1990 to 2020 based on the 30 m Landsat data and used the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as a representation of the green space quality to comprehensively analyze residential exposure to green space at the city and block scales within the 5th ring of Beijing, China. We found that the urban green space in Beijing is mainly distributed in urban areas between the 4th and 5th rings (i.e., 153.4 km2 in 2020), and there is little green space within the 2nd ring area (i.e., 12.6 km2 in 2020). There is clear spatial inequality in residential exposure to green space, and about 2.88 million (i.e., ~27%) residents have experienced different degrees of decline in residential exposure to green space from 2015 to 2020. However, the degree of inequality in residential exposure to green space has gradually weakened from a high level (Palma ratio = 2.84) in 1990 to a relatively low level (Palma ratio = 0.81) in 2020. In addition, the spatial-temporal analysis method of residential exposure to green space based on green space quality has certain advantages that can help explore the degraded and lost areas of green space.