I am wondering what percentage of the total landmass in the EU is considered as domestic/private gardens (with or without allotments/community gardens), but not limited to data solely from allotments? Or what percentage of urban green areas in the European Union is considered as domestic gardens? Could someone provide reliable data on this along with a reference? Many thanks in advance.
Dear Zsofia,
I think, these data are not easy to find. Probably the statistical webpages: for Germany www.statista.de or www.destatist.de (Statistisches Bundesamt) can be sources of information. Here I can find, that 9,6% of the land used for settlements (cities, roads, industry) are "green areas", so here is everything included: parks, gardens, small recreational areas, city trees, hedges, etc. . In statista a questionnaire asked people, wether they have a garden or not and more than 50% answered yes. But many peoply consider a small lawn in front of their entrance door as a garden, already. So it will be important to have a proper definition what you consider as a garden. Another way to retrieve data may be to do surveys in garden clubs, garden associations or via the markets involved in garden supply or the tree nurseries associations.
best whishes,
Ricarda
You might find some basis for inference in the references of the paper at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-022-00859-4#Bib1
Ricarda Koopmann, Michael John Patrick thank you for the useful information. In addition to these, I also found an article providing some data. e.g. "(...) in the United Kingdom and other European countries (...), yards constitute roughly 25% of the total urban land cover and as much as 50% of green spaces (Goddard et al. 2017).") https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/73/9/671/7289288#box1
Zsófia Varga-Szilay INRE: '... yards occupy a much larger area than typically recognized (approximately 30% of the conterminous United States), from the article.
This is insanely wrong, even with the most generous definition of what a 'Residential Yards' is ( '...yards (also called domestic gardens, home gardens, homesteads) ). Their definition is too simplistic, especially for the US, much of their 'yards' are probably misclassified agricultural land use in urban and suburban ares - "For instance, metropolitan counties and adjacent areas supply nearly 60% of the market value of U.S. farm production and they play important roles from local to national food security [17]. These counties supply 91% of domestically sourced fruits, tree nuts, and berries; 77% of vegetables and melons; 68% of dairy; and 55% of eggs and poultry [17]. Farms in metropolitan counties often supply local and regional markets, making up 81% of the food sold directly to consumers; 76% of community-supported farms; and 74% of farms selling directly to retail outlets [17,24]" from
Article U.S. Farmland under Threat of Urbanization: Future Developme...
I'm somewhat surprised, given one of the authors is from the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station - the USDA has one of the most extensive detailed data collections in the world. The various overlapping classification hierarchies for various domains ( https://www.construction-physics.com/p/every-building-in-america-an-analysis ) is really hard to parse out. In my opinion, this paper is more about serving an ideological / political agenda, than being a neutral piece:'Expanding the Biden administration's 30 × 30 Executive Order 14008, which lays out an ambitious goal to combat the climate crisis by protecting 30% of US land and waters by 2030 and includes private land (Executive Office of the President 2021), to yards,... '