Urban Nature, Climate Resilience, and Human Health

Dear Colleagues,

Cities concentrate both the populations most exposed to a warming climate and the ecological infrastructures—green and blue spaces, urban forests, soil, biodiversity — most able to buffer that exposure. Yet much of the existing research has focused primarily on the ecological performance and technical functions of urban nature, measured through canopy cover, cooling effects, ecosystem services, or the distribution of green infrastructure. However, these approaches often under-specify the social and relational processes through which nature is reconnected with, made meaningful, and converted into resilience and health in everyday urban life. Research on belonging, place attachment, intercultural relations in healthcare, and the moral and emotional registers through which residents narrate their relationship with the non-human world has begun to show that climate resilience and health are not simply delivered by green infrastructure, but co-produced through situated practices of care, memory, and participation, as well as through governance, social inclusion, and collective engagement with urban nature.

This Special Issue invites empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that examine how urban nature mediates climate resilience and human health from interdisciplinary social science perspectives. It welcomes work that engages critically with the society–nature divide, and the social dimensions of environmental governance, that foregrounds emotional, narrative, and intercultural dimensions of human–nature relations in cities, and that interrogates how regenerative and nature-based planning processes redistribute — or fail to redistribute — wellbeing across urban populations. Particular attention will be given to contributions addressing environmental justice, climate adaptation, health equity, urban governance, citizen participation, and regenerative urban futures. The Issue sits within Climate's concern with the societal dimensions of a changing climate and aims to bring sociological, anthropological, public health, urban planning, geography, environmental psychology, and environmental governance perspectives into sustained dialogue.

Original research articles, systematic and critical reviews, and short communications are welcome on themes including the following:

• Urban nature, place attachment, and belonging under conditions of climate change.
• Regenerative and participatory urban planning, and the role of emotion and narrative in shaping it.
• Climate vulnerability, intercultural communication, and access to primary healthcare.
• Social and spatial inequalities in exposure to, and benefit from, urban green and blue infrastructure.
• Moral, spiritual, and lay rationalities of human–nature relations in urban and peri-urban contexts.
• Mental health, ecological wellbeing, and nature-based social prescribing in cities.
• Governance and policy critiques of nature-based solutions and their socio-ecological assumptions.
• Methodological innovations for capturing relational and emotional dimensions of climate adaptation.
• Environmental and climate justice in urban transitions.
• Citizen participation, co-production, and citizen science for climate adaptation.
• Planetary health, urban health, and the climate–health nexus.
• Social innovation and governance for regenerative cities.

Dr. Diogo Guedes Vidal
Dr. Fátima Alves
Dr. Rosário Rosa
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Climate is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 1800 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.

• urban nature
• climate resilience
• human health and wellbeing
• environmental sociology
• urban sustainability
• health equity
• intercultural intercultural dimensions
• regenerative urban planning
• place attachment and belonging
• climate vulnerability
• nature-based solutions
• humans and non-humans participation
• socio-environmental inequalities/environmental justice