There is now widespread recognition of the need for inter/transdisciplinary (I/TD) approaches to solving global problems like climate change and biodiversity. Yet methods for successfully integrating knowledge across disciplines, and between research and practice, are in need of further development, particularly approaches that can ameliorate epistemological and ontological divides. Here we propose a framework for good listening as a ‘weak method’ that can provide guidance and structure to I/TD collaborations, but does not assume the form and goals a given collaboration will take. Synthesising the results of a scoping, interdisciplinary literature review, we highlight four key components of listening—receiving, processing, interpretation, and feedback/response—and provide a set of normative values regarding ‘good listening’ for each. Our goal is to provide a framework that is grounded in detailed scholarly discussions of listening politics and practice, but that is specifically formulated in response to the needs and concerns of I/TD researchers. We then apply our framework to four commonly encountered challenges in sustainability science, drawing on our collective experience in the field to explore how good listening can aid I/TD collaboration in regards to inclusion, group dynamics, format and pace. In doing so, we hope to inspire those working in sustainability science to approach I/TD collaboration in a new way and provide a tool for facilitating caring and transformational approaches to solving the world’s most pressing sustainability crises.

Extreme weather events are on the rise, increasingly impacting cities and their urban populations. In response, urban greening and nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as key approaches for reducing risks from multiple types of extreme climate and weather events while making a positive impact on urban social and environmental inequities. NbS interventions are high on urban agendas worldwide, but in practice, they often are hyper-local and contain novel ecological entities, with unknown capacity to deal with different pressures and disturbances. Thus, there is an urgent need to build knowledge around how, when, and under what circumstances different NbS can be expected to perform their functions as intended. One step towards building, and then constantly updating, such knowledge is to establish practices for monitoring and evaluating NbS.

In this study, we showcase a novel approach based on wireless sensor technology that harnesses hyperlocal data in real time to understand the direct impact of NbS on the local climate across seasonal variation and under extreme weather conditions. We aimed to quantify to what extent NbS are contributing to ecosystem services such as cooling.

To answer this, we installed eighteen microsensor weather stations across the biggest and most recent sustainable urban development in Sweden - Stockholm Royal Seaport. We investigated five distinct types of NbS - forest parks, green courtyards, rain gardens, green roofs, and lawns, during the summer of 2021 to examine whether real-time temperature changes varied between NbS site types. Despite large differences in vegetation and urban landscape, we did not observe a clear trend in air temperature differences between sites, even for experimental reference sites. Our analysis reveals that forest parks are the coolest and the green roofs are the warmest green places overall. The largest differences in daytime temperatures reached up to 2 °C difference between sites in summer, which gradually disappeared during cooler months. Our results suggest that regional weather dynamics dominate over the Stockholm Royal Seaport's micro-climate, leading to a relative similarity in NbS cooling performances. Though the district overall may be too homogeneous to affect air temperature variation and local NbS too small to alter the regional weather patterns, we nonetheless conclude that ecosystem services of NbS should not be taken for granted. Results suggest that NbS interventions, almost regardless of type, need to be considered and implemented at larger district scales to add up to the substantial total green cover needed to impact local and regional temperatures.

Smart city development is expanding rapidly globally and is often argued to improve urban sustainability. However, these smart developments are often technology-centred approaches that can miss critical interactions between social and ecological components of urban systems, limiting their real impact. We draw on the social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) literature and framing to expand and improve the impact of smart city agendas. A more holistic systems framing can ensure that ‘smart’ solutions better address sustainability broadly and extend to issues of equity, power, agency, nature-based solutions and ecological resilience. In this context, smart city infrastructure plays an important role in enabling new ways of measuring, experiencing and engaging with local and temporal dynamics of urban systems. We provide a series of examples of subsystems interactions, or ‘couplings’, to illustrate how a SETS approach can expand and enhance smart city infrastructure and development to meet normative societal goals.