Urban Resilience Thinking
Summary
We are entering a new urban era where the planet is increasingly influenced by human activities and where cities have become a central nexus of the relationship between people and nature, both as crucial centers of demand for ecosystem services, and as sources of environmental impacts.
However, in the next two to three decades, we have unprecedented chances to vastly improve global sustainability through designing urban systems for increased resource efficiency, as well as through exploring how cities can be responsible stewards of biodiversity and ecosystem services, both within and beyond city boundaries.
Two central concepts for achieving this—urban sustainability and urban resilience—have, however, until now rarely been applied beyond city boundaries and have often been constrained to either single or narrowly defined issues (e.g., population, climate, energy, water)
