GoKawiilResearchers warn urban greening ignores collapse of rural hinterlands
A group of researchers argue that global urbanization, while celebrated for green city initiatives, is masking the steady degradation of the countryside that cities depend on. They cite up to 400 million hectares of abandoned land since the 1950s and roughly half the world's rangelands classified as degraded, driven by migration, land conversion and resource extraction to feed urban growth. They call for combined geospatial monitoring, landscape engineering and watershed planning to treat cities and their surrounding rural areas as one connected system.