Disaggregating the Green Metric : A GIS-Based Analysis of Green Infrastructure Equity in Copenhagen and its Implications for Urban Sustainability Reporting

Sammanfattning

Cities are increasingly relying on green-space indicators, including proximity-based targets such as the “3-30-300” rule, to showcase progress on environmental equity and urban sustainability. This thesis tests whether aggregated green assessment is sufficient to assess urban green equity. Using Copenhagen as a critical case, the thesis compares the spatial distribution of recreational parks with that of ecologically functional green space, including forests, wetlands and semi-natural habitats, across the city’s 12 lokaludvalg districts. The results show two different distributional profiles. Copenhagen's parks are present in all districts with moderate inequality (population-weighted Gini = 0.474) and no systematic income gradient, consistent with deliberate municipal planning for recreational green provision. Ecological green, measured using the same district-level distributional approach, is absent from 9 out of 12 districts and is severely unequal (Gini = 0.822). A single peripheral district holds 100% of the city’s recorded Urban Atlas forest cover, while the highest-income quartile holds no strict ecological green and near-zero broad ecological cover. Between 2012 and 2018, ecological cover declined while urban fabric expanded in several districts, suggesting that the gap is not static but widening. The thesis introduces a floor-and-ceiling framework to explain this deviation. Parks represent the ‘floor’ as accessible dimensions of green equity, modular, designable and fundable through municipal budgets. Whereas ecological green represents the ‘ceiling’, structurally constrained by physical space and development competition, resisting redistribution regardless of policy intent. The finding has direct implications for urban sustainability reporting. A city can meet every park-proximity target while presiding over severe ecological inequality that is income-independent, concentrated and temporally deepening. When sustainability assessments rely on a single aggregate green metric, they systematically overstate distributional equity. The practical recommendation is that reporting framework should disaggregate green by functional type, separate recreational from ecological indicators and monitor land-cover change over time or risk producing metrics that are technically correct but substantively misleading.