William Solecki - Böcker

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the interactions and feedbacks between urbanization and global environmental change. A key focus is the examination of how urbanization influences global environmental change, and how global environmental change in turn influences urbanization processes. It has four thematic foci: Theme 1 addresses the pathways through which urbanization drives global environmental change. Theme 2 addresses the pathways through which global environmental change affects the urban system. Theme 3 addresses the interactions and responses within the urban system in response to global environmental change. Theme 4 centers on critical emerging research.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the interactions and feedbacks between urbanization and global environmental change. A key focus is the examination of how urbanization influences global environmental change, and how global environmental change in turn influences urbanization processes. It has four thematic foci: Theme 1 addresses the pathways through which urbanization drives global environmental change. Theme 2 addresses the pathways through which global environmental change affects the urban system. Theme 3 addresses the interactions and responses within the urban system in response to global environmental change. Theme 4 centers on critical emerging research.

Climate impacts and risk, within and across cities, are distributed highly unequally. Cities located in low latitudes are more vulnerable to climate risk and impacts than in high latitudes, due to the large proportion of informal settlements relative to the housing stock and more frequent extremes. According to EM-DAT, about 60% of environmental disasters in cities relate to riverine floods. Riverine floods and heatwaves cause about 33% of deaths in cities. However, cold-waves and droughts impact most people in cities (42% and 39% of all people, respectively). Human vulnerability intersects with hazardous, underserved communities. Frequently affected groups include women, single parents, and low-income elderly. Responses to climatic events are conditioned by the informality of social fabric and institutions, and by inequitable distribution of impacts, decision-making, and outcomes. To ensure climate-resilient development, adaptation and mitigation actions must include the broader urban context of informality and equity and justice principles. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Embedding climate resilient development principles in planning, urban design, and architecture means ensuring that transformation of the built environment helps achieve carbon neutrality, effective adaptation, and well-being for people and nature. Planners, urban designers, and architects are called to bridge the domains of research and practice and evolve their agency and capacity, developing methods and tools consistent across spatial scales to ensure the convergence of outcomes towards targets. Shaping change necessitates an innovative action-driven framework with multi-scale analysis of urban climate factors and co-mapping, co-design, and co-evaluation with city stakeholders and communities. This Element provides analysis on how urban climate factors, system efficiency, form and layout, building envelope and surface materials, and green/blue infrastructure affect key metrics and indicators related to complementary aspects like greenhouse gas emissions, impacts of extreme weather events, spatial and environmental justice, and human comfort. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Environmental issues have always burdened cities and their residents. This volume analyses how cities have solved past environmental challenges to provide a framework on which to build solutions to the problems caused by the climate crisis. It sets urban environmental crises within the socio-technical history of urban development. With six application chapters that provide rich and detailed examples of urban environmental transitions - including water resources, air quality, and public health - this book promotes better understanding of how urban environmental change takes place across a wide array of social-ecological-technological systems. It illustrates the process of urban environmental transition and the role crises play in shifts in urban environmental policy. Readers of the book will gain a deeper understanding of urban climate action and activities for future action. It is invaluable reading for students, researchers, and policymakers in environmental sustainability, climate change, urban studies and planning, and public policy.