The built environment has become fluent in the language of sustainability metrics but still ignores the green canopy that makes cities liveable.
To address this glaring contradiction the International Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH) is calling for urban greening standards.
The standards recognise urban greening as critical infrastructure, not just cosmetic beautification.
AIPH technical initiatives manager, Audrey Timm, said a city can boast impeccable emissions reporting and rigourous climate action plans while simultaneously neglecting the soil beneath its pavements, the biodiversity of its parks, the resilience of its canopy and wellbeing of its inhabitants.
“Dashboards may glow green, but the reality for plants is more complex,” Timm said.
“The more AIPH worked with cities around the world, the more we discovered the same structural problem: there was no global, validated way to evaluate a city’s relationship with plants and nature.
“Cities knew how to count carbon. Few knew how to assess the health of their living city.
“It became obvious that the world had no shared language for understanding what good urban greening actually looks like.”
This led to the creation of the world’s first globally applicable, plant‑centred standard for greener cities, focused on integrating urban nature as essential infrastructure.
“Unlike many sustainability tools conceived in academic or consulting environments, the AIPH Green City Standard was shaped through continuous engagement with cities themselves — their frustrations, their blind spots, their political realities,” Timm said.
The AIPH team realised that to build a credible standard, they would need something far deeper and more nuanced than a checklist, it required a framework.
“The message was clear: a credible green city standard must go beyond measuring outcomes to understand how they are achieved, support continuous improvement, and enable shared learning,” she said.
Most standards begin with carbon. Cities are evaluated on emissions, energy use, waste management, transportation. Nature appears later, often as aesthetic enhancement or community amenity.
The AIPH Standard flips the sequence entirely. Urban nature is the starting point, not a supplementary chapter.
“We are fundamentally plant-centric,” Timm said. “That doesn’t mean ignoring climate or social benefits. It means recognising that plants are infrastructure — living infrastructure — with enormous power to shape a city’s resilience.”