Resident-Level Sufficiency of Urban Green Infrastructure Services in Moscow Across District, Quarter, and Grid Representations

Abstract

Large metropolitan green spaces can be described using the total share of land cover types or an ecosystem-services index, but these metrics do not indicate whether vegetation producing the desired services overlaps with people affected by sealing, emissions, heating, surface water runoff, and poor local green space. This paper considers Moscow based on population-oriented ordinally sufficient analysis of the largest urbanized territory. The available data consists of 118 administrative districts, residential quarters, regular grid cells, more than 12 million residents, 841 landscaped objects of green infrastructure, 202.1 km² of landscaped green infrastructure, 86 nature reserves covering 149.8 km², and six physical services. Calculation is performed with thresholds and score distributions of sanitary-zone vegetation, stormwater regulation, cooling capacity, cultural green access, residential green provision, and roadside green space. Each block is assessed for adequate land share and adequate resident share such that ecological sufficiency and resident coverage will not be confused. It is concluded that there is little correlation between metropolitan green abundance and resident sufficiency. Regulating services appear to be the largest deficit, with adequate land share rising from 12.0% of district area to 19.2% of grid area, whereas adequate resident share goes up merely from 11.3% to 11.7%. Cultural access and residential provision are better accounted for by quarter level with 48.4% of adequate area and 38.3% of adequate population. Roadside green space shows greatest sensitivity to the grid-level analysis with 37.2% of adequate area and 34.2% of adequate population. Moscow therefore has plenty of green space infrastructure but lacks resident sufficiency due to insufficient overlap of ecological services and human exposure to urban environment.