Greenery fosters sustainable outdoor environments and promotes walking and healthy lifestyles. Greening children's home-school routes can be seen as an environmentally sustainable solution that enhances their daily interaction with nature. However, the uneven distribution of greenery and route networks within cities results in varied opportunities for pedestrians, including children, to experience greenery. This study evaluates the urban heterogeneity of trade-offs between exposure to greenery and route length. We focus on the shortest and greenest hypothetical home-school routes for all children in the city. For this purpose, we conducted a spatial analysis using multiple spatially explicit data sets on primary schoolchildren, pedestrian street networks, and high-resolution urban green space maps, with Łódź (Poland) as the case study city. Children who opt for the greenest hypothetical routes instead of the shortest could increase their exposure to greenery by 18%. However, maximizing exposure to greenery requires choosing routes 9.5% (46 m) longer than the shortest alternative. The trade-off between the shortest and greenest home-school routes is more pronounced for children in the urban core area compared to other city zones. This urban heterogeneity should be considered when allocating new greenery to support active transportation.

Children’s home–school walks are a perfect opportunity for green routes and active transportation. However, the availability of greenery along them likely varies among different socio-economic status (SES) groups. If low-SES children have less exposure to greenery than others during these walks, this might represent environmental injustice in transportation. We assess socio-environmental inequalities regarding children’s exposure to greenery in three alternative home–school routes: the shortest, simplest, and greenest. We used a mixed-method approach, linking viewshed analysis, space syntax and network analysis using multiple Lodz (Poland) datasets. Exposure to greenery along all three types of home–school routes is consistently lower for low-SES than high-SES children, signalling environmental injustice. In particular, even the greenest home–school routes of low-SES children are less green than the simplest and shortest ones of high-SES children. Combining the knowledge of pedestrian movement and environmental justice is needed to understand and address these injustices adequately.

Urban stormwater runoff has posed significant challenges in the face of urbanization and climate change, emphasizing the importance of trees in providing runoff reduction ecosystem services (RRES). However, the sustainability of RRES can be disturbed by urban landscape modification. Understanding the impact of landscape structure on RRES is crucial to manage urban landscapes effectively to sustain supply of RRES. So, this study developed a new approach that analyzes the relationship between the landscape structural pattern and the RRES in Tabriz, Iran. The provision of RRES was estimated using the i-Tree Eco model. Landscape structure-related metrics of land use and cover (LULC) were derived using FRAGSTATS to quantify the landscape structure. Stepwise regression analysis was used to assess the relationship between landscape structure metrics and the provision of RRES. The results indicated that throughout the city, the trees prevented 196854.15 m ³ of runoff annually. Regression models ( p ≤ 0.05) suggested that the provision of RRES could be predicted using the measures of the related circumscribing circle metric (0.889 ≤ r 2 ≤ 0.954) and the shape index ( r 2 = 0.983) of LULC patches. The findings also revealed that the regularity or regularity of the given LULC patches’ shape could impact the patches’ functions, which, in turn, affects the provision of RRES. The landscape metrics can serve as proxies to predict the capacity of trees for potential RRES using the obtained regression models. This helps to allocate suitable LULC through optimizing landscape metrics and management guidance to sustain RRES.

There is a large body of research on the benefits green spaces offer city dwellers and how people use urban green spaces (UGS). However, there is much less information on how many people do not use UGS, who these people are, and why they resign from going there. This paper focuses on understanding reasons that restrict the use of UGS and draws the socio-economic and demographic profile of UGS non-users. For this purpose, we surveyed N = 10,391 respondents from 33 European countries (statistically representative at the country level). Results show that about 10% of the respondents do not use UGS. However, the share of non-users differs between countries from 2% (Turkey) to 25% (United Kingdom). Results reveal statistically significant differences between those who do not use and those who use UGS across age, education level, and residential location, demonstrating the importance of considering the needs of different groups of people when designing, planning and managing UGS. Lack of time and interest, and long distance from where people live are key limiting factors. The dominant reasons for not using UGS enable us to group the countries using the hierarchical agglomerative clustering analysis. With this study, we contribute to the knowledge of personal barriers that prevent UGS use and, in particular, connect the different reasons for not using UGS with the socio-economic groups typically listed as deprived when it comes to UGS provision.