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Cities located in the Arctic often have extreme geographic and environmental contexts and unique sociopolitical and economic trajectories that, when combined with amplified effects of climate change in the region, impact future sustainable development. Well-recognized and standardized sustainable development indicator (SDI) frameworks such as ISO 37120 or UN-Habitat City Prosperity Index are often used to compare data across cities globally using comprehensive sets of indicators. While such indexes help characterize progress toward development and guide short- and long-term decision-making, they often lack relevance to specific contexts or characterize future visions of urban growth. To evaluate the extent of these deficiencies and to provide a comparative analysis of approaches to sustainable urban growth in the Arctic, this paper analyzes city planning documents for five northern cities - Anchorage (USA), Utqiagvik (USA), Reyjavik (ISL), Iqaluit, (CAN), Whitehorse, (CAN) - for goals, targets, and indicators and compare these to thematic areas and indicators defined by ISO 37120:2018 Sustainable Cities and Communities. The results confirm that although international SDI frameworks may be useful for comparative analysis of cities across diverse regions, they exclude important local factors that influence goal-oriented urban sustainability planning strategies employed in the Arctic region.

Conserving landscapes used by multiple stakeholder groups requires understanding of what each stakeholder values. Here we employed a semi-structured, participatory approach to identify features of value in the terrestrial Antarctic Peninsula related to biodiversity, science and tourism. Stakeholders identified 115 features, ranging from Adélie penguin colonies to sites suitable for snowshoeing tourists. We split the features into seven broad categories: science, tourism, historic, biodiversity, geographic, habitat, and intrinsic features, finding that the biodiversity category contained the most features of any one category, while science stakeholders identified the most features of any stakeholder group. Stakeholders have overlapping interests in some features, particularly for seals and seabirds, indicating that thoughtful consideration of their inclusion in future management is required. Acknowledging the importance of tourism and other social features in Antarctica and ensuring their integration into conservation planning and assessment will increase the likelihood of implementing successful environmental management strategies into the future.

The world is currently facing uncertainty caused by environmental, social, and economic changes and by political shocks. Fostering social-ecological resilience by enhancing forests’ ability to provide a range of ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, habitat provision, and sustainable livelihoods, is key to addressing such uncertainty. However, policy makers and managers currently lack a clear understanding of how to operationalise the shaping of resilience through the combined challenges of climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and changes in societal demand. Based on a scientific literature review, we identified a set of actions related to ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and disturbance and pressure impacts that forest managers and policy makers should attend to enhance the resilience of European forest systems. We conclude that the resilience shaping of forests should (1) adopt an operational approach, which is currently lacking, (2) identify and address existing and future trade-offs while reinforcing win–wins and (3) attend to local particularities through an adaptive management approach.

Climate change will substantially increase extreme rainfall events, especially in the Tropics, enhancing flood risks. Such imminent risks require climate adaptation strategies to endure extreme rainfall and increase drainage systems. Here, we evaluate the potential of nature-based solutions by using an ecosystem service modeling approach, evaluating the impact of extreme rainfall events on flood risks in a large urban area and with a real-world land recovery plan. We evaluate the cost-effectiveness of four different land recovery scenarios and associated co-benefits, based on a gradient increase in area recovered and cost of implementation. Although the scenarios reveal increasing flood risk reduction and co-benefits along with greater proportion of land recovery, the most cost-effective scenario was the one with an intermediate land recovery where 30% of the study area would be reforested. We emphasize the striking benefits of nature-based solutions for flood risk reduction in cities, considering landscape scale and stakeholders’ needs.

Addressing the ‘wicked problem’ of nutrient pollution requires coordinated policies spanning across diverse sectors and environmental systems. Using a case study of Canadian legislation, we apply semantic network analysis to identify thematic links across an inventory of 245 nutrient-related policies. Our analysis identifies twelve topics with unique types of connections across multiple facets of Canadian society. ‘Hub’ policies include broad environmental protection, land use planning, and climate-related legislation with close ties to multiple other topics. ‘Bridge’ policies create connections among otherwise disconnected topics in the network, representing opportunities to inform new policy proposals. Some legislation, such as food processing regulations, indirectly relates to nutrient use but could inform policy integration towards more coordinated and holistic nutrient management across the food system. A computational text network approach can be useful for addressing challenges in complex policy analysis, including by identifying unique entry points to guide more cross-cutting nutrient policy development.

The Anthropocene concept raises awareness of human-induced planetary changes but is criticized for being ‘too global’. We examined the social–ecological memory that emerges from people-tree relationships in South American temperate territories, Chile. We integrated dendrochronology (analysis of tree rings of 35 memorial trees; 17 species) with dendrography (participant observation complemented with semi-structured and go-along interviews with 14 interviewees; six women, eight men). We found that assemblages of people–tree relationships reflect marked historical changes in the territory, associated with the historical clearing of forests, which may be imprinted in both tree growth rings and in the social meanings and practices associated with memorial trees. In devastated territories, practices of tree care emphasize interconnectedness, multispecies collaborations, and the blurring of boundaries between humans and other-than-humans. We discuss some of the interdisciplinary and relational insights of our study, which may prove valuable for future research, political agendas, and educational programs in South America and beyond.

When accounting for the social–ecological impact of an ecological restoration program, both objective environmental contexts and people’s subjective perceptions are required. While this kind of environmental impact assessment lacks a comprehensive perspective. We use the difference-in-differences model to evaluate the effect of the greenness of the landscape after ecological migration in the Qilian Mountains in China; and analysis of variance and fixed effects models are used to evaluate the effects of such ecological restoration programs on local people’s perceptions. The results show that the ecological migration program in the Qilian Mountains has been successful at not only significantly improving remotely sensed greenness at the landscape scale, but also at enhancing immigrants’ environmental perceptions. These findings demonstrate the environmental impacts of ecological migration from a social–ecological perspective, and can provide methodological implications for landscape planning to support a better understanding of ecological restoration programs in the drylands.

Embracing a “more global” urban comparison in scientific assessments of climate actions by cities is essential to drive greater and more inclusive participation in global efforts to curb climate change. This comparison needs to engage cities irrespective of their size and status: when we do so, distinctive patterns of urban climate mitigation actions across a diverse range of cities emerge. Employing K-means clustering as a pattern recognition method, this study compares cities based on selected aspects of their reported mitigation actions to the Carbon Disclosure Project. It explores whether the identified clusters facilitate the comparison of a socio-spatially diverse range of cities. The study identifies five clusters within two themes, namely the nature and finance–implementation of actions, shedding light on shared and distinct governance aspects of mitigation actions by cities. Notably, the study underscores how governance patterns transcend city size and global status. These findings offer valuable insights for broadening the comparative imagination of cities and inter-city networking opportunities.

The intensive utilization of tropical inland water bodies for multiple and sometimes competing activities underlines the necessity for their integrated and holistic co-management. This paper presents our synthesis on lake and reservoir fisheries in South and Southeast Asia as social–ecological systems, based on a synopsis of our research findings from a previous EU-funded research programme in Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines (FISHSTRAT project). The paper attempts to merge our results with recent developments in research, policy and practice. We explore the effects of the main external and internal control mechanisms of the trophic state and pinpoint to the high production potential of traditionally unexploited small indigenous fish species. The limitations of conventional centralized management systems highlight the importance of introducing transdisciplinary approaches which integrate limnology, fish ecology and fisheries with the interests of other resource using stakeholders and decision makers in order to develop locally appropriate co-management strategies for sustainable aquatic resource use.