Urban green-cover and the environmental performance of Chennai city A. Meenatchi Sundaram Received: 13 January 2010 / Accepted: 2 June 2010 / Published online: 13 June 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract Chennai city the capital of Tamil Nadu is located in southeastern India. Its average population growth rate is 25% per decade, which recurrently alters the city’s land- cover particularly the receding green-cover distressed the city’s self-renewal capacity, in terms of groundwater recharge, pollution sequestration and microclimatic amelioration. This has been appraised by means of a GIS model. This model was developed using three sets of green-cover associated parameters, namely air quality amelioration, hydrological process regulation and microclimatic amelioration. The outcome confirms the difference in the city’s environmental performance between the 1997 and 2001. At some parts of the city, due to the green-cover change, the extent of modification was 38%, in terms of mean percent change in all three sets of parameters mentioned earlier. Through coefficient of correlation (r) method, relationship between green-cover change and environmental per- formance change are checked. It confirms positive relationship (r = 1) in all parts, except at few places. Keywords Air quality  GIS model  Human well-being  Land cover  Runoff  Urban heat island 1 Introduction The vanishing greeneries oversimplify many aspects of the environmental process and also triggered problems like urban heat island effect, more runoff, groundwater depletion pollution and so on (Setchell 1995; Alberti 1999; Whitford et al. 2001; Hamdi and Schayes 2008). As a consequence, the cities become enervated to keep up the well-being of its population (Cacciola et al. 2002; Nowak and Crane 1998; Norberg 1999; de Hollander and Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue. A. Meenatchi Sundaram (&) Department of Architecture, National Institute of Technology, Trichy 620015, Tamil Nadu, India e-mail: meenatchi@nitt.edu; a.me.sundar@gmail.com 123 Environ Dev Sustain (2011) 13:107–119 DOI 10.1007/s10668-010-9251-y