toronto greenest city

Toronto ranked one of the greenest cities in the world

Toronto has been ranked one of the greenest cities in the world. This makes sense if you're one of the people who calls it the Emerald City on account of its large green spaces, which coexist beside concrete infrastructure.

The work in assessing the greenest cities in the world comes courtesy of Newsha Ghaeli of MIT's Senseable City Lab, who used an algorithm to assess images on Google Street View and determine the green-to-grey ratio in each picture.

Ghaeli then complied the data into Treepedia, an interactive map that catalogues the greenery in various cities based on the canopy cover from the street view images.

Toronto ranks a decent 19.5 per cent on the Green View Index, which makes sense when considering how much emphasis we place on creating green spaces around the city, and our extensive network of trails and park systems.

While we trail behind Vancouver, which ranked 2nd with a 25.9 per cent GVI, it's still nice to be the biggest city in the country and still have excellent greenery. You might even say that we have it all.

Lead photo by Empty Quarter

Latest Videos



Latest Videos


Join the conversation Load comments

Latest in City

New laws and rules coming to Ontario next month

Toronto getting a new park that will just be torn up and replaced by another park

Canadians about to get first child tax payment of 2025

Toronto's metro area population has officially exceeded 7 million people

Ontario residents are about to get their $200 provincial rebate cheques

Here's how much more people in Ontario are taxed than other provinces and U.S. states

Canada about to clamp down on immigration eligibility and here are the facts

Toronto is hiring for a ton of jobs right now and many pay over $100K