Green Infrastructure (GI) and Urban Forests (UF) provide important ecosystem services for urban and peri-urban populations. However, particular sections of society such as the income deprived, the disabled and ethnic minority groups may not have the same opportunities and access to GI and UF that more affluent sections of society enjoy. They may also face exposure to more environmental risks and benefits less of the ecosystem services provided by UF and GI. To understand why, researchers have turned to the perspective of socio-environmental justice combining social justice (every individual is entitled to fair and equal treatment and equal access to rights and benefits) and environmental justice (the right to a clean environment, equally shared benefits from ecosystems and fairly distributed negative impacts of nature). The presentation will focus on socio-environmental justice related to cultural ecosystem services (CES). We will outline which sections of society (in a range of different European countries) have access to and benefit from accessing urban GI and wider GI and, more importantly, which sections of society do not have this opportunity. We will elaborate on barriers for accessing and using urban green space for less privileged groups, with a special attention to how cultural norms and traditions are related to use of GI and UF. Experiences from several European countries show how newly developed urban green spaces are less used than expected by social groups for which high needs for green spaces were defined. This demonstrates how studies towards distributional socio-environmental justice, that comprise the majority of studies related to use and access of urban green space, are probably not tapping into the major issue: traditional urban green space is not in line with the expectations of the targeted users. Finally, we will discuss the issue of eco-gentrification, or how introducing more accessible green areas into the urban tissue for underserved communities can lead to thriving those communities out of their neighbourhoods. The study has been conducted within the framework of the COST-action GreenInUrbs (FP1204).