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 ...

While global financial capital is abundant, it flows into corporate investments and real estate rather than climate change actions in cities. Political will and public pressure are crucial to redirecting funds. Studies of economic impacts underestimate the costs of climate disasters, especially in cities, so they undermine political commitments while understating potential climate-related returns. The shift of corporate approaches towards incorporating environmental, social, and governance...

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...

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 hea...

Cities have suffered from three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and are increasingly experiencing exacerbated heatwaves, floods, and droughts due to climate change. Going forward, cities need to address both climate and public health crises effectively while reducing poverty and inequity, often in the context of economic pressure and declining levels of trust in government. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in city readiness for simultaneous responses to pandemics and climate change, ...

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 cha...

Every day, we are presented with a range of “sustainable” products and activities—from “green” cleaning supplies to carbon offsets—but with so much labeled as “sustainable,” the term has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative. Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best pr...

Andrew Sancton combines his own broad knowledge of global changes with an outline and comparison of the viewpoints of prominent social scientists to argue that city regions in western liberal democracies will not and cannot be self-governing. Self-government requires a territory delineated by official boundaries but the multiple boundaries of city-regions unlike the clear and undisputed boundaries of provinces and states continue to move outward due to the constant growth and expansion of urb...

Environmental governance encompasses our relations to nature, spanning institutions and policies in fields such as biodiversity loss, climate change, land use and pollution. This book offers tools for the study of environmental conflicts, analyzes the current status of environmental policies and discusses why we are so far from resolving many of the issues we face. It also offers alternative directions for future environmental governance.Key features include:an interd...

It is vitally important for businesses to have a holistic understanding of the many issues surrounding and shaping sustainability, from competitors to government and political factors, to economics and ecological science. This integrated textbook for MBA and senior-level undergraduates offers a comprehensive overview of the issues of sustainability as they relate to business and influence corporate strategy. It also features a wide range of cases and an extensive discussion of tools to inc...

Encouraging students to engage in the challenges and complexity of sustainability, this text considers not only the theories underlying sustainability, but more importantly how theories are translated into practice and the difficulties of achieving this in the world in which we live. This pragmatic focus gives students a greater understanding of the practice of sustainability and highlights the challenges involved. Models and theories are illustrated throughout with real world examples to ...

Highly commended in the Public Health category, BMA Medical Awards 2010 There are enormous health benefits from tackling climate change. This is the first book to set out what health practitioners can do to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, to make health services sustainable, and to design healthy, sustainable communities. The book: - provides an introduction for health practitioners and students to climate change and its current and future health impacts - describes the relati...