Contribution of green urban areas to the achievement of SDGs. Case study in Valencia (Spain)

[EN] The Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 of United Nations is made up of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that humanity will have to meet by 2030. In achieving the SDGs, green urban areas (GUA) play a fundamental role at the local level as they provide recreational and bioclimatic regulatory functions and act as a carbon sink, as well. Specifically, the GUAs contribute directly to three SDGs: SDG 11 Sustainable cities and communities, SDG 13 Climate Action and SDG 15 Life on land. This paper evaluates direct contribution of GUA to this SDGs with high spatial resolution in the case study of the city of Valencia (Spain). The evaluation carried out has made it possible to make a diagnosis of the quantity and accessibility of GUA at sub-neighbourhood level. The results for SDG 11 show that only 9.23% of the population do not have desirable access to GUA and 2.73% live in areas without easy walking distance access to GUA. On the other hand, the evaluation of SDG 15 shows that each inhabitant has at their disposal 10 m2 of GUA, below the average of cities of more than 250,000 inhabitants in Spain. The high spatial resolution of the evaluation has also made it possible to identify the city areas with the worst access to GUA and the least amount of GUA per inhabitant. In consequence, the results allow determining zones with high potential to improve. Additionally, the quantification of the CO2 fixed by the GUA carried out for the evaluation of SDG 13, shows that the fixed carbon is equivalent to 0.04% of total gross GHG emissions of the city and is 36% higher than the total GHG emissions of the annual fuel consumption of the total fleet in the city. Finally, the monitoring of the indicators applied allows evaluating the evolution of the GUA to improve the sustainable development of the city.We are grateful to the Valencia City Council, specifically the Department of Open Government and Transparency directed by Elisa Valia, through the DataGovernance VLC university chair, for being able to make available much of the data necessary for this research. We are also thankful to the company GreenUrbanData, which provided tech-nical expertise that greatly assisted the research. Finally, we also thank the scientific support of Dr Carolina Perpina and Dr Carlo Lavalle of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (Directorate B-Growth and Innovation, Territorial Development Unit B3) for their scientific support within the framework of collaboration agreement (No. 35930) to contribute to analyse field of urban sustainability indicators, where Valencia acts a City Lab under the framework of the EU Com-munity of Practice on CITIES. Funding sources This work was supported by the Regional Agency of Innovation of Valencia/Spain (AVI) in the project TRUST "Sustainable urban transition through metrics for public decision based on big data" (INNEST00/18/005) .Lorenzo-Sáez, E.; Lerma Arce, V.; Coll-Aliaga, E.; Oliver Villanueva, JV. (2021). Contribution of green urban areas to the achievement of SDGs. Case study in Valencia (Spain). Ecological Indicators. 131:1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2021.10824611113