Urban Growth without Green Compensation: A Multi-Source Geospatial Evidence-Fusion Framework for Climate-Responsive Architectural Planning in Benghazi, Libya

Abstract

Rapid urban change in data-scarce cities is difficult to translate into defensible architectural planning because geospatial products often differ in extent, resolution, class definition, and date. This study develops a provenance-aware multi-source evidence-fusion framework for Benghazi using Copernicus EMSN080 urban-sprawl products (2017–2020) and an independent Sentinel-2 NDVI land-cover assessment (2017–2021). Copernicus shows artificial surfaces increasing from 162.253 to 168.569 km², a gain of 6.316 km² (3.89%) and a CAGR of 1.281%. The Sentinel-2 study reports urban land increasing from 57.4227 to 59.0490 km² while green space declined from 12.1338 to 8.1908 km². Re-analysis shows the green-to-urban ratio falling from 0.211 to 0.139 (−34.36%). The combined evidence supports disturbed-land infill, protection and reconnection of residual green infrastructure, lake-edge safeguards, and annual geospatial monitoring.