Effectiveness of green infrastructure location based on a social well-being index

Urban Green Infrastructure (GI) provides promising opportunities to address today’s pressing issues in cities, mainly resulting from uncurbed urbanization. GI has the potential to make significant contributions to make cities more sustainable by satisfying the growing appetite for higher standards of living as well as helping cities adapt to extreme climate events. To leverage the potentials of GI, this article aims to investigate the effectiveness of GI that can enhance social welfare benefits in the triple-bottom line of urban sustainability. First, publicly available data sets representing social demographic, climate, and built environmental elements are collected and indexed to normalize its different scales by the elements, which is termed as the “Social Well-being Index.” Second, a random forest regressor was applied to identify the impacts of variables on the indexed scores by region. As a result, both the Seoul and Gyeonggi-do models found the most significant relationship with the type of GI to prevent pollutants and disasters, followed by GI types to conserve and improve the environment in Seoul and GI types to serve activity spaces in Gyeonggi-do. Furthermore, variables such as population, number of pollutants, and employment rate in Seoul were found significant and employment rate, population, and air pollution were significant in Gyeonggi-do. Finally, a scenario analysis is conducted to investigate the impacts of the overall index score with additional GI facilitation according to the model’s findings. This article can provide effective strategies for implementing policies about GI by considering regional conditions. The analytical processes in this article can provide useful insights into preparing effective ecological and environmental improvement policies accordingly.