Lorien Nesbitt

Greening practitioners worry about green gentrification but many don’t address it in their work

As cities attempt to ameliorate urban green inequities, a potential challenge has emerged in the form of green gentrification. Although practitioners are central to urban greening and associated gentrification, there has yet to be an exploration of practitioner perspectives on the phenomenon. We fill this gap with an online survey of 51 urban greening practitioners […]

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Achieving the Urban Tree Trifecta: Scenario Modelling for Salubrious, Resilient, and Diverse Urban Forests in Densifying Cities

Background: Urban forests can provide nature-based solutions (NBS) to complex climate-change challenges via the provision of ecosystem services such as shade and cooling that offset increased risks of chronic diseases and excess mortality. They also confer indirect health benefits by providing regulating ecosystem services that can facilitate climate-change mitigation efforts: increased shade can encourage shifts

Achieving the Urban Tree Trifecta: Scenario Modelling for Salubrious, Resilient, and Diverse Urban Forests in Densifying Cities Read More »

Assessing changes in urban vegetation using Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for epidemiological studies

Urban vegetation is an important component of healthy, livable cities and has been linked to several benefits, including improved human health outcomes, natural system regulation, and habitat provision. Understanding and documenting changes to urban vegetation is essential for planning for sustainable cities. This study focuses on identifying where and when urban vegetation changed in Metro

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Modelling Four Neighbourhood-Scale Urban Forest Scenarios for 2050: Vancouver, Canada

Background: Urban forests are increasingly recognized as important tools in climate change mitigation and adaptation, prompting many cities to set tree canopy cover targets. However, current gaps in knowledge include understanding relationships and the feasibility of maximizing benefits between urban greening and other climate actions, such as densification. This study offers a data-driven and manageable

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British Columbia, Canada, as a bellwether for climate-driven respiratory and allergic disorders

Touching briefly on health effects related to climate change, we orient this Paradigms and Perspectives article within the context of British Columbia, Canada, in hopes that highlighting challenges in British Columbia will be informative and inspirational to others. We describe issues faced in our context, in which extreme climatic events have accelerated dramatically in a

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Invited Perspective: Nature Is Unfairly Distributed in the United States—But That’s Only Part of the Global Green Equity Story

As we experience increased impacts of climate change and urbanization, the many benefits to health and well-being provided by green and blue spaces are becoming more important, and research has shown these health benefits to be particularly strong for lower-income populations. Given these benefits, we have seen increased societal concern about the inequitable distribution of

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Data-driven natural asset management – Rogers Demo Day Video

5G Data-Driven Natural Asset Management and Integration Smart Nature based Solutions for Sustainable Cities, a Campus as a Living Lab funded project, explores the use of smart and digital technologies to support urban forest health and create sustainable, equitable cities. As cities densify and climate change increasingly stresses our social-ecological systems, cities can leverage technological

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Wealthy, educated, and… non-millennial? Variable patterns of distributional inequity in 31 Canadian cities

This article assesses the distribution of urban vegetation in 31 Canadian cities to determine whether certain social-economic/demographic factors are associated with increased proximity to greenness. Using spatial lag models, Canadian census data, and urban ‘greenness fractions’ derived from Landsat imagery, we find diversity between cities in the factors associated with increased urban vegetation. This makes

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Improvement, not displacement: A framework for urban green gentrification research and practice

As researchers have continued to expand the bounds of green gentrification scholarship, understanding of what green gentrification is and how to identify the phenomenon on the ground has grown obscured. In an attempt to bring clarity to this conversation, our research presents an urban green gentrification framework, based on findings from a scoping review and

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Expelled from the garden? Understanding the dynamics of green gentrification in Vancouver, British Columbia

There is substantial evidence detailing the ecological and social benefits provided through urban greening. However, research in the field of urban green equity has revealed that these benefits are not enjoyed equitably by all residents; existing disparities in the distribution, accessibility, and experience of urban greening disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities and residents. Furthermore, green

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