Enhancing Green and Blue space quality auditing tools to include environmental justice and biodiversity

Green and blue spaces (GBS) are increasingly recognised as critical infrastructures supporting ecosystem services, biodiversity, and human wellbeing. Existing tools for auditing the quality and accessibility of GBS provide valuable insights for policymakers, yet have largely overlooked dimensions of environmental justice and biodiversity, reducing their capacity to address inequities in access and distribution of wellbeing benefits for users. This study presents an expansion of the NEST tool (Natural Environment Scoring Tool) that integrates those two new dimensions. We present the process of developing the tool, reliability and coherence testing results as well as the development of an online, adaptable version for configuring domains and indicators in other contexts, designed to support flexibility in use. Data for the tool was collected across 7 countries and 9 sub-areas, compiling audits from 529 GBS. Results from Inter-rater reliability(IRR) testing of all indicators in the tool and Inter-item coherence (IIC) testing of new proposed ‘domains’ are presented. Overall, the testing shows high overall IRR and IIC concordance, except for weaknesses in very few indicators and the ‘domain’ for safety. This is positive given the complexity of defining shared GBS qualities internationally. The tool can inform equitable governance of GBS across urban and rural contexts.