Urban Sustainability: Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction

Dear Colleagues,

Climate change is a systemic challenge, which interacts strongly with socio-economic factors and their regional and global trends, in particular at the urban scale. Cities are centers of innovation and economic development and home to most of the population, all over the world. At the same time, they are undergoing climate change impacts, ranging from slow on-set events (e.g. sea level rise, increasing air temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns) and extreme events (e.g. heatwaves, droughts, intense rainfall events, floods and storm surges). In the background of existing urban sustainability challenges to increase resilience and decarbonization efforts, climate change impacts often exacerbate existing social inequalities and marginalization, which can generate new health risks and amplify current health problems. These existing inequalities create unequal conditions of exposure and sensitivity to these impacts, throughout different parts of the city and among different communities. Furthermore, multiple impacts at the local scale, such as an increase in climate-sensitive diseases and a loss of ecosystem services (e.g. water retention, food production, cooling, energy production, recreation) put at risk resources which are crucial for well-functioning cities, as well as losses of quality of urban spaces and of livelihoods. A loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and livelihoods, as well as increasing inequalities, are renowned as factors which reduce resilience in social, and thus, also, in urban systems.

This Special Issue comprises articles which focus on policy/science and practices of effectively combining climate change adaptation (CCA), disaster risk reduction (DRR) and transformative changes into systemic approaches at the urban scale, in developed and developing countries. The submitted articles should, in particular, focus on effective long-term integrated strategies and approaches for CCA and DRR, by considering transformative changes and including issues related to equity and justice, either in developing or developed parts of the world. We expect contributions which can include policies analyses, studies based on modelling approaches for the integrated assessment of transformative strategies for urban areas and practice-based analysis of promising concepts for considering physical and socio-economic transformation for climate resilience.

Dr. Sergio Castellari
Dr. Margaretha Breil
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• integrated approach of CCA and DRR at urban scale
• transformative change
• social vulnerability