Green Spaces May Hold the Key to Circular Cities in the Global South

The circular economy has become one of the most influential ideas in modern sustainability science, promising cities that design out waste, keep materials in use, and regenerate the natural systems they depend on. Yet a new review published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology argues that the entire conversation has been shaped almost exclusively by the Global North, and that this narrow framing risks missing the very places where circular transitions are most urgent. The study, led by Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie of Charles Darwin University with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, the University of Amsterdam, and Charles Darwin University, makes a bold and technically grounded case: in the cities of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, the circular economy cannot be understood, planned, or implemented without placing urban green infrastructure at its very center.

The research team applied a structured narrative review combined with systematic search procedures, drawing on Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Their Boolean search strategy paired circular economy terms such as closed-loop systems, zero waste, and waste-to-energy with transition language, green infrastructure terminology, and Global South identifiers. From 193 initial records, screening removed duplicates, conference papers, and non-journal publications, leaving 64 articles for eligibility assessment. Peer-reviewed English-language studies with an explicit focus on circular transition and urban green infrastructure in the Global South yielded 37 articles, supplemented by reference-list snowballing. Each study was appraised on a six-dimensional framework covering clarity of objectives, methodological appropriateness, credibility of evidence, depth of analysis, theoretical relevance, and scholarly contribution, with only studies scoring 4.5 or higher retained. The final evidence base comprised 37 peer-reviewed articles and 12 policy documents from bodies including the African Union, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the African Circular Economy Alliance.

The conceptual heart of the paper is a spatial argument. Circular activities such as recycling, reuse, and storage require land and location, and shifts in urban metabolism inevitably show up in urban form, land use, and land cover. The authors contend that most circular economy scholarship fixates on urban metabolism and governance while neglecting this spatial dimension. Their proposed remedy is to treat urban green infrastructure, the interconnected network of parks, street trees, wetlands, green roofs, urban forests, and urban farms woven into the urban fabric, as the spatial anchor of circular transitions in Southern cities. Where formal infrastructure and finance are limited, green infrastructure can supply low-cost material inputs, ecosystem services, and livelihood opportunities that conventional circular economy models simply do not account for.

The quantitative case for circularity itself is striking. The Circularity Gap Report estimates that adopting circular economy principles could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent and demand for virgin materials by 28 percent. Research using fixed-effects regression in the United States found that a one percent increase in waste recycling correlates with a 0.4 percent increase in direct circular economy jobs. The circular model works by slowing, narrowing, and closing material and energy loops through value-retention principles such as reduce, reuse, repair, remanufacture, and recycle, complemented by sharing economy platforms, servitization models that sell function rather than ownership, and industrial symbiosis in which the byproducts of one firm become the inputs of another.

But the review is unsparing about why these mechanisms translate poorly to the Global South. Circular transitions there are constrained by weak state institutions and bureaucracy, political instability and social inequality, reliance on foreign technologies and investment, and economies dominated by preindustrial, low-tech, and informal sectors. Frameworks designed in Amsterdam or Copenhagen assume regulatory capacity, data availability, and formal markets that often do not exist in Lagos, Nairobi, or Dhaka. The authors cite scholar Wieczorek’s diagnosis that applying Global North transition models to the South neglects socio-cultural realities, infrastructural and financial constraints, and the dominance of informality, demanding instead context-specific, bottom-up, and inclusive approaches. In much of the South, circular behavior is born of economic necessity, with higher-value reuse and remanufacturing remaining rare, and China standing out as the one Southern economy that has made significant strides.

What makes the paper genuinely provocative is its inversion of the usual deficit narrative. Rather than framing Southern cities as laggards lacking technology, the authors identify abundant low-cost opportunities: vacant lots awaiting greening, informal recycling networks already operating at scale, community gardens, and local material streams that can be mobilized through green-infrastructure-centered strategies. Unlike high-cost, technology-heavy interventions favored in the North, urban green infrastructure delivers scalable, distributed benefits that reduce implementation costs while advancing inclusion. The evidence spans continents. In Sierra Leone, the Freetown the Treetown initiative plans to plant one million trees to combat heat stress and improve air quality in informal settlements. In India, Ahmedabad’s heat action plan, combining tree planting and cool roofs, has been credited with saving an estimated 1,100 lives a year after deadly heatwaves.

The technical mechanisms linking greenery to circularity are concrete. Composting organic matter such as food scraps and green waste creates nutrient-rich soil for urban gardens while diverting waste from landfills, a practice documented in Ecuador and Brazil. Urban agriculture closes resource loops by reusing kitchen waste as fertilizer, lowering waste collection costs and reducing landfill deposition. Green roofs reduce stormwater flows and improve building energy performance, while treated wastewater can be redirected to irrigate parks, creating closed-loop water systems. In Ghana, the Tamale Integrated Recycling and Composting Plant transforms vacant lots into neighborhood parks by integrating green infrastructure into public spaces through a circular strategy. In Ethiopia, the Reppie waste-to-energy plant in Addis Ababa converts municipal waste into electricity while its strategy channels biodegradable outputs into urban farming and greening. The review reports that across these cases, higher circular economy activity is associated with more extensive urban green infrastructure.

The authors formalize these observations in a conceptual framework they call the UGI-CE transition nexus, situated explicitly within the pressures of rapid urbanization, climate vulnerability, infrastructure deficits, informal economies, and governance and financial constraints. Within this framework, circular economy mechanisms such as waste reduction, resource recovery, material reuse, land regeneration, and ecosystem restoration provide the foundations for green infrastructure development, while green infrastructure in turn delivers biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation, green public space, improved health, and strengthened livelihoods. The result is a positive feedback loop: circular practices expand green networks, and green networks enhance the environmental quality and resource efficiency on which circular processes depend. The framework draws heavily on nature-based solutions theory, which holds that cities and nature are inherently connected and that restoring natural cycles of water filtration, carbon sequestration, and nutrient cycling helps cities transition toward cleaner, more resource-efficient economies.

The paper is candid about its limits and about the risks of its own prescription. The empirical literature directly linking green infrastructure to circular outcomes in the South remains sparse, uneven, and heavily reliant on grey literature and case studies of variable methodological transparency, compounded by English-language publication bias. The authors warn that indiscriminately transplanting Northern-designed green interventions risks displacement, green gentrification, and unequal access to benefits, and they call for co-design with local communities, tenure security, benefit-sharing mechanisms, and social protection. They also flag documented downsides of urban greenery, including tree roots damaging water lines and concerns about disease vectors, insisting that benefits must be weighed against real harms rather than assumed.

The study’s conclusion is a direct challenge to policymakers and researchers alike. The circular economy is indispensable to sustainable urban futures, yet implementation remains substantially more advanced in the Global North, a geographic imbalance that demands focused attention on Southern contexts. Treating urban green infrastructure as a foundational enabler, rather than an afterthought, offers Southern cities tangible agency: it lowers cost barriers, supports informal-sector livelihoods, and advances environmental justice. The authors call for longitudinal, mixed-methods, comparative studies pairing harmonized green metrics with circular outcome measures such as waste diversion rates and material loop closure, alongside participatory research that foregrounds informal actors and Indigenous knowledge. If they are right, the future of the circular economy may not be written first in the smart cities of Europe, but in the parks, gardens, and informal recycling economies of the Global South.

Subject of Research: The role of urban green infrastructure in enabling circular economy transitions in Global South cities

Article Title: Circular economy transitions and urban green infrastructure in the Global South: pathways and prospects

Article References: Erdiaw-Kwasie, M. O., Cobbinah, P. B., Arhin, P., & Abunyewah, M. (2026). Circular economy transitions and urban green infrastructure in the Global South: pathways and prospects. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2051-2070. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00139-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00139-4

Keywords: circular economy, urban green infrastructure, Global South, sustainability transitions, urban metabolism, nature-based solutions, waste management, urban agriculture, climate adaptation, informal economy, spatial planning, industrial ecology