Airborne assessment uncovers socioeconomic stratification of urban nature in England

Abstract: Urban green infrastructure is essential for climate resilience, public health, and environmental justice. Yet, the absence of standardised methods to quantify urban nature hinders the development of equitable greening policies. In this study, we present the first national, building-level assessment of the 3-30-300 urban greening rule, a policy framework proposing that every citizen should see three trees from their home, live in a neighbourhood with 30\% canopy cover, and reside within 300 m of a public green space. Using high-resolution LiDAR (Vegetation Object Model), Sentinel 2 imagery, and open geospatial datasets for over 28 million buildings across England, we integrate raster, vector, and socioeconomic data within a scalable computational framework. Tree segmentation was performed using adaptive local-maximum filtering, canopy cover estimated at 1 m resolution, and park accessibility derived from network-based walking distances. Inequality in access to nature was quantified via Gini coefficients and modelled with spatial error regressions against socioeconomic deprivation. Our results reveal that while most urban areas meet the 3-tree proximity rule, fewer than 3\% achieve 30\% canopy cover, and only a minority satisfy all three components simultaneously. Crucially, ambient greenness (trees and canopy) is concentrated in affluent areas, whereas proximity to parks is greatest in dense, often deprived urban centres, exposing a multidimensional nature gap. This framework establishes a reproducible, open, and computationally efficient blueprint for evaluating urban nature equity at scale, supporting the integration of environmental justice metrics into national urban planning agendas.