Abstract: Nigeria’s rapid urbanization is changing the quantity, quality, and spatial distribution of urban blue-green spaces (UBGS), which comprises water bodies and vegetated areas. These changes have implications for ecosystem services, urban resilience, and human well-being. This study presents a rigorous, spatially explicit framework to investigate how population pressure produces heterogeneous patterns of urban blue-green spaces availability in Akure. The assumption of spatial stationarity and homogeneity rarely holds in urban socio-ecological systems, where processes operate differently across neighbourhoods, necessitating locally adaptive modelling approaches such as Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). GWR explicitly models spatial non-stationarity and is appropriate for examining how drivers such as population density relate locally to Urban blue-green space (UBGS) metrics. The GWR method was used to study the impacts of population density interactions on UBGS across the nine political wards in the study area. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) spectral index was used to analyze vegetation distribution using Landsat OLI 2024 imagery. Using a combination of remote sensing and GIS analysis, field surveys, and demographic and planning data, the study analysed the spatial dynamics of urban blue-green space distribution in relation to population density. Using standard GWR with adaptive bi-square kernel and AICc bandwidth selection, applied across nine administrative wards, the model explains 26.9% of the spatial variance in UBGS distribution (R² = 0.269). Local population coefficients range from approximately 61 to 110 across wards, confirming spatially heterogeneous ecological stress. The GWR results confirm that the relationship between population density pressure and urban blue-green space in Akure is spatially heterogeneous, with pronounced hotspots of ecological stress in the inner-city transition zones and rapidly urbanising wards, emphasizing the need for neighbourhood-based solutions tailored towards the peculiarity of ecological stress, which varies spatially across a city, and the mainstreaming of blue-green infrastructure into urban expansion corridors. These findings align with the SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities) and SDG 15 (Life on Land) policy frameworks, and suggest that Akure’s UBGS trajectory reflects broader patterns of rapid ecological depletion in informally urbanizing Sub-Saharan African cities.

Keywords: Urban blue-green space, Geographically Weighted Regression, NDVI, Spatial non-stationarity, and ecological stress

Pages: 1-9

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