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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.)

Climate change actions in cities worldwide are driving deep changes in urban governance. We ask whether new capacities for transformative climate governance are emerging in two cities that have experimented with urban climate governance: Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and New York City (NYC), United States. Transformative climate governance creates the conditions for developing integrated and innovative climate mitigation and adaptation policies and interventions that respond to and shape urban transformation dynamics and contribute to sustainability and resilience. The comparison of capacities for transformative climate governance in Rotterdam and NYC offers insights into the emerging features of urban climate governance vis-à-vis existing urban governance regimes: how urban climate governance is driven and delivered, what new governance conditions emerge, and whether these conditions enable transformative climate governance. In both cities, an integrated, experimental and inclusive approach to climate governance is emerging, which crosses multiple policy sectors and domains (e.g. transport, energy, health, justice), involves a variety of actors and facilitates innovative solutions. Envisioning, long-term goal and knowledge integration, experimentation and tapping into coalitions for change help to provide the basis (including guiding principles, urgency, actor networks, innovative solutions) for transformative climate governance. However, these transformative approaches tend to be still subordinate to business-as-usual interests and policy and planning approaches, which favour isolated, incremental and short-term responses. The challenge for strengthening transformative climate governance will be to develop rigorous institutional and organisational conditions that decisively stipulate a prioritisation of climate change across scales and sectors, provide action mandates and enable wider coordination, collaboration and learning., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

• Partnerships between cities can play an important role in cloudburst knowledge systems. • There is a need for improved projections of cloudburst intensity with climate change. • There is a need for social science research to improve cloudburst risk dimensioning. • Policymakers need support in decision-making under climate change associated uncertainties. Cities are particularly vulnerable to cloudbursts - short-duration, intense rainfall events – which are often inadequately addressed through conventional stormwater and flood management policy. Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of cloudbursts in many cities. As minor cloudburst events become more frequent and extreme events more severe, cities will need to rapidly transform their stormwater drainage and interdependent systems, and the knowledge systems that guide their infrastructure decisions and policy. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of knowledge systems to address these challenges, using three diverse cities (Phoenix, USA; Copenhagen, Denmark; and New York City, USA) as case studies. We found that partnerships between cities – even across national boundaries – can be a particularly important component of cloudburst knowledge systems. We also identified limitations in knowledge systems related to non-stationary climate, the vulnerability of private property and the representation of cloudburst infrastructure in integrated water management, which present opportunities for future research to support decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Megacities are predominantly concentrated along coastlines, making them exposed to a diverse mix of natural hazards. The assessment of climatic hazard risk to cities rarely has captured the multiple interactions that occur in complex urban systems. We present an improved method for urban multi-hazard risk assessment. We then analyze the risk of New York City as a case study to apply enhanced methods for multi-hazard risk assessment given the history of exposure to multiple types of natural hazards which overlap spatially and, in some cases, temporally in this coastal megacity. Our aim is to identify hotspots of multi-hazard risk to support the prioritization of adaptation strategies that can address multiple sources of risk to urban residents. We used socioeconomic indicators to assess vulnerabilities and risks to three climate-related hazards (i.e., heat waves, inland flooding and coastal flooding) at high spatial resolution. The analysis incorporates local experts' opinions to identify sources of multi-hazard risk and to weight indicators used in the multi-hazard risk assessment. Results demonstrate the application of multi-hazard risk assessment to a coastal megacity and show that spatial hotspots of multi-hazard risk affect similar local residential communities along the coastlines. Analyses suggest that New York City should prioritize adaptation in coastal zones and consider possible synergies and/or trade-offs to maximize impacts of adaptation and resilience interventions in the spatially overlapping areas at risk of impacts from multiple hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Extreme events are of interest worldwide given their potential for substantial impacts on social, ecological, and technical systems. Many climate‐related extreme events are increasing in frequency and/or magnitude due to anthropogenic climate change, and there is increased potential for impacts due to the location of urbanization and the expansion of urban centers and infrastructures. Many disciplines are engaged in research and management of these events. However, a lack of coherence exists in what constitutes and defines an extreme event across these fields, which impedes our ability to holistically understand and manage these events. Here, we review 10 years of academic literature and use text analysis to elucidate how six major disciplines—climatology, earth sciences, ecology, engineering, hydrology, and social sciences—define and communicate extreme events. Our results highlight critical disciplinary differences in the language used to communicate extreme events. Additionally, we found a wide range in definitions and thresholds, with more than half of examined papers not providing an explicit definition, and disagreement over whether impacts are included in the definition. We urge distinction between extreme events and their impacts, so that we can better assess when responses to extreme events have actually enhanced resilience. Additionally, we suggest that all researchers and managers of extreme events be more explicit in their definition of such events as well as be more cognizant of how they are communicating extreme events. We believe clearer and more consistent definitions and communication can support transdisciplinary understanding and management of extreme events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities and urbanized regions are complex, dynamic, and highly integrated systems linking social, ecological, and technical infrastructure domains in ways that create deep challenges for good governance, policymaking, and planning. The combination of impacts from climate change in cities, air pollution, rapid population growth, multiple sources of development pressure and overall urban system complexity make it difficult for decision-makers to develop and guide development trajectories along more livable, equitable, and at the same time, more resilient pathways. Advancing urban sustainability and resilience agendas requires expanding the scope of inter- and trans-disciplinarity approaches, moving beyond the historically separate social–ecological and socio-technical approaches to jointly study social–ecological–technical infrastructure systems in cities. We take urban complexity as a given and suggest that in both research and practice we need to better capture and understand feedbacks, interdependencies, and non-linearities which create uncertainties and challenge the efficacy of governance practices to achieve normative goals for society. Here, we explore new methods, tools, and approaches to advance our understanding of urban system complexity through a series of journal special issue articles that examine urban structure–function relationships, urban sustainability transitions, green space availability, social–ecological memory, functional traits, and urban land use scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]