Emotions relate to climate change action in various ways. Here we elaborate on how the expansion of digital social networks and advances in artificial intelligence, ranging from recommender systems to generative AI, may affect the way people perceive and engage emotionally on climate change. We develop a simple framework that links individual and collective emotions, AI, and climate action, and suggest three critical areas in need of further investigation.

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that upcoming decades are likely to be accompanied with an increase in climate impacts in urban areas, thereby stressing the need for empowering cities to help them address the challenges ahead by closing the urban adaptation gap. The lock-in systems in which cities are often trapped create resistance to change and leads to missed opportunities to cocreate better futures. Putting nature at the center of urban adaptation agenda is a promising vision that nature-based solutions can help realize if city leaders are adequately supported in accessing the knowledge and resources they need to take action. Despite their proven potential, important barriers to the planning, implementation, and management of nature-based solutions (NbS) for urban climate adaptation persist and need to be urgently addressed. We highlight key barriers related to knowledge gaps and dissemination, policy incentives, and financial autonomy faced by city leaders trying to integrate NbS into policy and planning. In this perspective, we propose four levers of transformative adaptation which build on examples from Europe, the United States, Africa, and Latin America and which have proven successful in supporting cities adopting naturebased adaptation actions, including to 1) produce, assess and share knowledge; 2) adopt incentive-based policies and regulations; 3) facilitate access to multiple sources of funding; and 4) create reflexive monitoring mechanisms. If these steps are taken with the goal of addressing vulnerabilities on the ground, they can unleash the potential of NbS to engage on a path of transformative adaptation.

Promoting people-nature relationships is essential for the effective adoption of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in cities. Across scientific domains, the potential of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies as a novel tool to support and enable people-nature relationships is increasingly highlighted. However, the application of XR in urban NBS planning remains uncertain. Through a scoping review of the literature, we found five major application areas for employing XR in the context of people-nature relationships: perception and preference assessment, spatial planning and design, education and awareness enhancement, psychological intervention, and monitoring and maintenance. In this paper, we examine how nature’s instrumental, relational, and intrinsic values are communicated through XR and explore the potential role that XR technologies can play in promoting people-nature relationships. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of adopting XR technologies for urban NBS planning.

Cities worldwide are increasingly adopting green interventions, such as nature-based solutions(NBS), to meet urban sustainability goals. However, how and where to optimize investments to receive the most benefit for NBS implementation are largely unknown. Here, we provide a continental-scale assessment of the effect of urban green areas for cooling across 32 Chinese cities that vary in size, climate, and native biome. The relationship between green patch size and surface temperature reveals a consistent decreasing concave-up relationship across varied cities, indicating that increasing green patch size initially corresponds to a decrease in temperature. However, this pattern shifts such that cooling benefits decrease per area once patch size increases to a specific climate threshold, a green-area threshold (GAT) for cooling. The direct implication is that large green space patches will be needed in temperate and drier cities for effective cooling as a climate adaptation strategy, whereas a smaller threshold is recommended in the tropics.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as a key strategy for sustainably addressing multiple urban challenges, with rapidly increasing knowledge production requiring synthesis to better understand whether and how NbS work in different social, ecological, economic, or governance contexts. Insights in this Perspective are drawn from a thematic review of 61 NbS review articles supported by an expert assessment of NbS knowledge in seven global regions to examine key challenges, fill gaps in Global South assessment, and provide insights for scaling up NbS for impact in cities. Eight NbS challenges emerged from our review of NbS reviews including conceptual, thematic, geographic, ecological, inclusivity, health, governance, and systems challenges. An additional expert assessment reviewing literature and cases in seven global regions further revealed the following: 1) Local context-based ecological knowledge is essential for NbS success; 2) Improved technical knowledge is required for planning and designing NbS; 3) NbS need to be included in all levels of planning and governance; 4) Putting justice and equity at the center of urban NbS approaches is critical, and 5) Inclusive and participatory governance processes will be key to long-term success of NbS. We synthesized findings from the NbS review results and regional expert assessments to offer four critical pathways for scaling up NbS: 1) foster new NbS research, technological innovation, and learning, 2) build a global NbS alliance for sharing knowledge, 3) ensure a systems approach to NbS planning and implementation, and 4) increase financing and political will for diverse NbS implementation.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are used to transform existing unsustainable and undesirable path dependencies in cities. For NBS to contribute to just urban transformations, a stronger inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge base is needed. This knowledge base is essential to engage with six complex yet crucial questions about NBS, including “for what?,” “which nature?,” “where?,” “how?,” “when,” and “for whom?.” To address these questions, we identify two critical opportunities to advance the knowledge of NBS. First, we argue for solidifying interdisciplinary approaches to examine how NBS can be designed, planned, and implemented for multifunctionality. Second, we argue that researchers need to work transdisciplinarily with diverse stakeholders to ensure the design, siting, and planning of NBS are appropriate to the context. In both critical opportunities, justice should be a core guiding principle from the beginning of planning the NBS, starting with the foundational understanding that NBS are not inherently just or unjust. Instead, their value depends on a holistic examination of the context in which they operate and the institutional logic that guides their planning. To center justice in the inter- and transdisciplinary research and practice of NBS, a knowledge shift from epistemological injustice to epistemological inclusivity is a critical way forward.

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.

As climate-driven extreme weather events continue to intensify, risk mitigation and governance are a critical aspect of urban climate change adaptation. Interdisciplinary knowledge integration is critical in order to account for varied perspectives related to the impacts of extreme weather events on urban systems. Despite advances made to integrate different strands of knowledge through systems-based approaches, few methods exist to contextualize and analyze the diversity of the knowledge being integrated. Assessing knowledge diversity exposes varying ways in which stakeholders identify and problematize the impacts of extreme weather events, uncovering knowledge gaps as well as dominant knowledge framings that might bias and/or hinder risk governance processes. This study presents a novel methodology that integrates a mental models approach with the social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) framework to assess and compare the perceptions of individual stakeholders on the impacts of extreme weather events on an urban system. By classifying system components and interactions into social, ecological, and technological domains, mental models enable the visualization of knowledge diversity, as well as the identification of potential gaps and silos in stakeholder understanding. The methodology is applied to New York City, engaging 20 expert stakeholders from diverse disciplines and sectors involved in mitigating the impacts of extreme precipitation. Findings reveal significant variability in how stakeholders emphasize SETS domains and interactions. By supporting more holistic and inclusive co-production processes, this approach provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for addressing the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change in urban environments.

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.