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The world has become urban; cities increasingly shape our worldviews, relation to other species, and the large-scale, long-term decisions we make. Cities are nature, but they need to align better with other ecosystems to avoid accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. We need a science to guide urban development across the diverse realities of global cities. This need can be met, in part, by shifts in urban ecology and its linkages to related sciences. This perspective is a "synthesis of syntheses", consolidating ideas from the other articles in the Special Section. It re-examines the role of urban ecology, and explores its integration with other disciplines that study cities. We conclude by summarizing the next steps in the ongoing shift in urban ecology, which is fast becoming an integral part of urban studies., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Livability, resilience, and justice in cities are challenged by climate change and the historical legacies that together create disproportionate impacts on human communities. Urban green infrastructure has emerged as an important tool for climate change adaptation and resilience given their capacity to provide ecosystem services such as local temperature regulation, stormwater mitigation, and air purification. However, realizing the benefits of ecosystem services for climate adaptation depend on where they are locally supplied. Few studies have examined the potential spatial mismatches in supply and demand of urban ecosystem services, and even fewer have examined supply-demand mismatches as a potential environmental justice issue, such as when supply-demand mismatches disproportionately overlap with certain socio-demographic groups. We spatially analyzed demand for ecosystem services relevant for climate change adaptation and combined results with recent analysis of the supply of ecosystem services in New York City (NYC). By quantifying the relative mismatch between supply and demand of ecosystem services across the city we were able to identify spatial hot- and coldspots of supply-demand mismatch. Hotspots are spatial clusters of census blocks with a higher mismatch and coldspots are clusters with lower mismatch values than their surrounding blocks. The distribution of mismatch hot- and coldspots was then compared to the spatial distribution of socio-demographic groups. Results reveal distributional environmental injustice of access to the climate-regulating benefits of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure in NYC. Analyses show that areas with lower supply-demand mismatch tend to be populated by a larger proportion of white residents with higher median incomes, and areas with high mismatch values have lower incomes and a higher proportion of people of color. We suggest that urban policy and planning should ensure that investments in "nature-based" solutions such as through urban green infrastructure for climate change adaptation do not reinforce or exacerbate potentially existing environmental injustices., (© 2021 The Authors. Ecological Applications published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Ecological Society of America.)

Record climate extremes are reducing urban liveability, compounding inequality, and threatening infrastructure. Adaptation measures that integrate technological, nature-based, and social solutions can provide multiple co-benefits to address complex socioecological issues in cities while increasing resilience to potential impacts. However, there remain many challenges to developing and implementing integrated solutions. In this Viewpoint, we consider the value of integrating across the three solution sets, the challenges and potential enablers for integrating solution sets, and present examples of challenges and adopted solutions in three cities with different urban contexts and climates (Freiburg, Germany; Durban, South Africa; and Singapore). We conclude with a discussion of research directions and provide a road map to identify the actions that enable successful implementation of integrated climate solutions. We highlight the need for more systematic research that targets enabling environments for integration; achieving integrated solutions in different contexts to avoid maladaptation; simultaneously improving liveability, sustainability, and equality; and replicating via transfer and scale-up of local solutions. Cities in systematically disadvantaged countries (sometimes referred to as the Global South) are central to future urban development and must be prioritised. Helping decision makers and communities understand the potential opportunities associated with integrated solutions for climate change will encourage urgent and deliberate strides towards adapting cities to the dynamic climate reality., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests We declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Present and future urbanization together with climate change and other uncertainties make urban quality of life a critical issue, and one that will need constant attention and deliberation. Across cities and contexts, urban ecosystems in the form of green and blue infrastructure, have the potential to contribute to human well-being as well as supporting biodiversity, and to do so under diverse conditions. However, the realization of this potential depends not only on the green and blue infrastructure itself, the well-being benefits are outcomes of the structures and processes of the entire urban system. Drawing on theory and insights from social-ecologicaltechnological systems (SETS) research and resilience assessments, we describe how a systemic understanding of the generation and delivery of green and blue infrastructure benefits may inform cross-sectoral strategies and interventions for building resilience around this particular aspect of human well-being. Connecting SETS to non-academic discourse and practice, we describe the urban system in terms of three systemic controlling variables: infrastructure, institutions, and the perceptions of individual beneficiaries, which we call filters, and how these can be used in different participatory processes to assess and build resilience around green and blue infrastructure and its benefits. To ground the conceptual and theoretical framework in real world complexity and make it operational in practice we discuss three case studies applying the framework in Barcelona, Halle, and Stockholm. All cases share the same general three-step process but their individual combinations of methods and adaptions of the filters framework are designed to fit with three necessarily unique collaborative, transdisciplinary processes. The cases are discussed in terms of outcomes and output, the ways they made use of the conceptual framework, and the challenges they faced. This exploratory work points to a new way of engaging with urban resilience--the strength of the approach is that it is not limited to the identification of specific interventions or policy options, nor trying to prevent change; rather it focuses on how to move with change and build resilience through constant balancing of different types of SETS change. Our study reinforces the growing understanding of how well-being benefits positioned as emergent outcomes of internal SETS interactions offers leverage for mainstreaming green and blue infrastructure throughout diverse governance processes and sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]