Social Value-Weighted Greenspace Exposure Index: A Novel Metric Integrating Cultural Ecosystem Services for Equitable Benefits

Well-maintained urban greenspaces (UGSs) can provide benefits for human health and recreation. Existing evaluations often focus solely on greenspace presence, overlooking their attractiveness and the resulting quality as perceived by the citizens. Thereby, we lack comprehensive understanding on whether citizens have equal access to high-quality UGSs that can truly provide health benefits and enhance life satisfaction, obscuring systemic inequalities in environmental justice. Here we sought to address this challenge by taking cultural ecosystem service (CES) and social values of UGSs as a proxy for the perceived UGS quality. Through a four-month survey of 558 citizens in Xiamen, China, we quantified UGS social values and integrated them into the evaluations of UGS use and the inequalities therein between neighborhoods. Our findings indicate that previous metrics may misrepresent actual enjoyment of UGSs (with coverage-based valuation at 10.28% while social value-weighted assessment is 6.49%), typically because neighborhoods may have greenspaces with disparate social values, causing an unbalanced distribution of attractive UGSs. When combined with major inequalities in access to high-quality UGSs, this may cause significant differences in perceived health benefits among citizens (Gini coefficient increases from 0.69 to 0.79). We additionally observed that the three focal drivers of these inequalities—greenspace coverage, local population mobility and UGS social values—vary across neighborhoods, informing targeted policy interventions. We highlight that disparities in UGS social values contribute to major extents to inequalities in health benefits, emphasizing the need to extend greenspace assessments from quantity to quality and ensuring equal access to high-quality greenspaces and their well-being benefits.