Researchers, including Dr Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, an urban ecologist at Bangor University, found that urban vegetation is surprisingly more resilient than its surrounding rural counterparts.
The findings, published in PNAS, challenge the view that cities are uniformly detrimental to ecosystem stability and highlight the potential role of sustainably managed urban green spaces under climate change.
Using satellite observations spanning 751 cities across 109 countries from 2001 to 2022, the research team conducted a global multi-decadal assessment of vegetation resilience. They defined resilience as the capacity of vegetation to recover following disturbance.
Dr Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, from Bangor University, said, “What surprised us most was how consistently urban vegetation outperformed surrounding rural areas in its ability to bounce back from climate shocks. In many cities, especially in hot, dry regions, urban green spaces appear to be acting as managed refuges, maintaining stability even as rural vegetation becomes more vulnerable. This doesn’t mean cities are inherently better for nature, but it does show that how we design, manage, and care for urban greenery can meaningfully buffer ecosystems against a changing climate”.
In the cities observed in the study, it was found that vegetation in urban cores was more resilient than surrounding rural vegetation in 78% of cities. This advantage was particularly pronounced in hot and arid regions, where vegetation is strongly constrained by water availability.
More importantly, the urban–rural resilience gap has widened over the past two decades. This divergence was driven primarily by declining resilience in rural vegetation, while urban vegetation remained comparatively stable or improved slightly over time.
The findings of the study are consistent with the possibility that the urban environment and sound management of it can help buffer vegetation against increasing climate stress, although the study does not establish irrigation itself as a direct cause.
The findings also reveal a deeper shift in how ecological stability can be maintained in cities. In 32% of cities, urban vegetation showed a “dual advantage”. That is, it experienced smaller greenness losses during disturbances and recovered faster afterwards than surrounding rural vegetation.
This pattern is consistent with a management-mediated relaxation of the usual resistance–resilience trade-off. Together, the results suggest that, when supported by sustainable and equitable management, urban green spaces may serve as managed refuges for vegetation resilience under climate change.
The study, “Global divergence in urban-rural vegetation resilience driven by broken ecological trade-offs”, was led by Professor Jin Wu from the School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, and Professor Yuyu Zhou from the Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), with Dr Zhengfei Guo as the first author.