Global divergence in urban-rural vegetation resilience driven by broken ecological trade-offs

While urban environments are known to extend growing seasons and enhance vegetation growth, whether these benefits also improve resilience to climate stress or instead create productive but vulnerable ecosystems remains uncertain. Using satellite observations from 2001 to 2022 across 751 large cities in 109 countries, we find that urban vegetation is more resilient than surrounding rural vegetation in 78% of cities. This urban-rural resilience gap has widened over time, driven by declining rural resilience alongside slightly improving urban recovery dynamics, particularly in arid regions where rural vegetation shows progressively slower recovery. Among the factors examined, the urban irrigation proxy, quantified as the urban-rural difference in evapotranspiration, was the strongest correlate of the urban resilience advantage, followed by canopy structure. In 32% of cities, predominantly located in arid regions, urban vegetation exhibited a dual advantage, combining smaller disturbance-related greenness losses with faster recovery than rural vegetation, consistent with management-mediated relaxation of the resistance-resilience trade-off. These findings challenge the view of cities as uniformly detrimental to ecosystem stability and suggest that, when supported by sustainable and equitable management, urban green spaces may serve as managed refugia for vegetation resilience under climate change.