Submit to Special Issue Submit Abstract to Special Issue Review for Sustainability Propose a Special Issue

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Rural and Urban Environments

Print Special Issue Flyer
Editor
Special Issue Information
Keywords
Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue
Published Papers

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Development Goals towards Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2026 | Viewed by 696

Share This Special Issue

Editor

Dr. Mary J. Thornbush

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, 50 Stone Road East, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Interests: climate change mitigation; soils; carbon trading
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Nations have slowly progressed towards the 2030 Agenda. The decade 2020–2030 has been designated the “Decade of Action” to speed up the implementation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) heading into 2030. The agenda is built on five pillars (the 5 Ps): People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership. Key challenges have remained poverty reduction, particularly in parts of Africa and South Asia; health reversals due to COVID-19 and other crises affecting life expectancy; increased frequency of climate disasters (floods, heatwaves) that have impacted the other goals, especially food security and water resources; and the funding gap for developing countries to meet their SDG targets. To progress, transformation is needed to accelerate progress, policy integration using a “whole-of-society” approach, and local action encompassing community-driven, tailored solutions are all still warranted.

This Special Issue on “Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Rural and Urban Environments” calls for original research articles, reviews, and case studies from anywhere around the world, evidently including urban and rural settings. As an environmental sustainability topic, this Special Issue will accept submissions relating to climate change, air quality, biodiversity, and conservation. Papers relating to the economic and social aspects are also relevant from a sustainability framework. This could entail green business, corporate sustainability, urban or rural development, and psychology. Topics on technology and engineering are timely and could address renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, waste management, and green building. Lastly, topics in policy and planning are admissible, with analyses related to sustainable governance, land use, and resource management all relevant to the scope of this Special Issue.

Authors are asked to adopt submission requirements of Sustainability in formatting their papers and determining length. Templates are available from the Author Guidelines webpage. Please contact the Guest Editor with any questions.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

SDG and global development themes;
Climate change mitigation and adaptation;
Environmental sustainability and ecosystems;
Technology, engineering, and innovation;
Economic and social dimensions;
Governance, policy, and planning

Dr. Mary J. Thornbush
Guest Editor

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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.

Keywords

sustainable development goals (SDGs)
climate change adaptation
climate change mitigation
rural and urban environments
environmental sustainability
renewable energy
biodiversity conservation
sustainable agriculture
governance and policy
community-based solutions

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (3 papers)

Download All Papers

Order results

Result details

Show export options Show export options

Select all

Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

Jump to: Other

14 pages, 443 KB

Open AccessArticle

Growth Composition and Carbon Intensity in Saudi Arabia: A Regime-Sensitive Predictive Analysis

by Uzma Khan, Aarif Mohammad Khan, Saba Nawaz Khan, Mohammad Junaid Alam, Fatimah Othman Alharbi and Nada Abdullah Ali Alshaer

Sustainability 2026, 18(13), 6611; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18136611 - 30 Jun 2026

Viewed by 219

Abstract

Climate-change mitigation in resource-dependent economies requires lowering carbon intensity (CO₂ per unit of GDP) while sustaining growth. Using annual data for Saudi Arabia (1970–2022), we examine how growth composition—structural change, educational scale, and urban population scale—relates to carbon intensity, via quantile regression and Toda–Yamamoto Granger (predictive) causality. All relationships are short-run, estimated on first-differenced, stationary data without cointegration, with bootstrap inference (standard errors, confidence intervals, pseudo-R²). Energy intensity is the dominant predictor of carbon intensity (≈+1.0 at every quantile, p < 0.001), consistent with the Kaya identity. Among the composition variables, only urban population scale shows a robust, regime-dependent association, turning positive and significant at the 10% level at the upper-middle quantiles (τ = 0.7–0.8). Structural change and trade openness show no robust independent association once energy intensity is controlled; educational scale is insignificant throughout; and no structural break appears around 2014, 2016, or 2020. The findings support a regime-sensitive, diagnostic reading of Vision 2030 prioritizing energy-mix decarbonization and cautious attention to urban demographic scale over uniform composition instruments. The study informs Sustainable Development Goals 7, 8, 9, 11, and 13. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Rural and Urban Environments)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

24 pages, 872 KB

Open AccessArticle

Impact of Risk Preference on Grape Growers’ Climate Adaptation Behaviors: Mediating Roles of Credit Access and Moderating Roles of Social Trust

by Yuwei Shi, Qianwei Wang, Xiandong Li and Lingfei Zhang

Sustainability 2026, 18(10), 5062; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105062 - 18 May 2026

Viewed by 193

Abstract

Improving the climate adaptability of farmers is crucial to ensuring agricultural production and achieving the goal of sustainable development in agriculture. Against the background of climate change aggravating agricultural risks, how do farmers’ own risk attitudes affect their adaptive behavior? Based on the micro-survey data of 480 grape growers in the Turpan-Hami Basin in 2025, we used the least squares method (OLS) to explore the impact of risk appetite on the climate adaptation behavior of farmers and its mechanism. The study found that risk appetite significantly promoted the adoption of adaptive behaviors by farmers. For every 1 unit increase in the risk preference score, the number of climate-adaptive behaviors adopted by farmers increased by an average of 0.322. Mechanism testing shows that both formal credit and informal credit play a partial intermediary role. The intermediary effect accounts for 18.3% and 36.3% respectively, and the transmission effect of informal credit is stronger; Institutional trust and interpersonal trust both positively regulate the relationship between risk preference and adaptive behavior at the level of 1%. Research shows that we should take into account risk education and production environment optimization, pay attention to the supplementary role of private lending, and build a multi-level trust promotion system to jointly improve the climate adaptability of farmers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Rural and Urban Environments)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Other

Jump to: Research

30 pages, 1697 KB

Open AccessSystematic Review

A Systematic Review of Soil Amendments Using Biochar and Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) for Soil Carbon Sequestration

by Mary Thornbush, Michael Zhang, Cooper Mandel, Ethan Andrews, Ellen Kempton and Muhammad Muneeb Ur Rehman

Sustainability 2026, 18(14), 7011; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18147011 - 9 Jul 2026

Abstract

This review provides a comparative critical synthesis of biochar and enhanced rock weathering (ERW), identifies key trends and gaps in soil carbon research, and outlines pathways for improving carbon sequestration and monitoring in soil systems. From a global perspective, materials and agricultural studies were read to examine the properties of these amendments and their effects in cropland and forest soils. The main research question guiding this literature review was as follows: What are common trends in published biochar and ERW studies? Major themes were derived from the stated question and structure the Discussion. The Web of Science provided access to relevant literature for both biochar and ERW, and a total of 38 articles (biochar: 17; ERW: 21) were read and covered in this paper. The findings conveyed the growing number of Chinese studies on these amendments to resolve climate-related soil quality affecting crop yields and potential for carbon sequestration, namely carbon dioxide removal or CDR—which sequesters CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere. Studies commonly used application rates of <5% for biochar and 5 or 50 t/ha for ERW, with (wood) biochar commonly processed at temperatures of 500–550 °C. Finer powders were known to be more effective due to their increased surface area, although there were emissions trade-offs to consider for climate change mitigation. There were options for using glacial rock flour (GRF) as an alternative. For ERW, the type of minerals matters, with basaltic amendments being most investigated and minerals like zeolite, for example, having quick responses and potential to filter out heavy metals. Depth of analysis was an issue in the studies, especially affecting ERW work—which needs to adopt greater depths (>60 cm) and both soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil inorganic carbon (SIC) or total carbon need address, particularly for ERW since studies only provided selective coverage. Biochar studies tended to focus more on crop yields and were not as concerned as ERW studies in CDR. Many studies agreed that these are promising products that need to be economically compared before being applied at a large scale. More field studies are needed to test biochar, while limitations imposed by soil pH (acidification affecting dissolution and nutrient availability) and climate need consideration for ERW—especially since it works best in warm, humid climates. The application rate and duration are important variables to also consider for ERW, and both SOC and SIC dynamics are subsystem components requiring consideration. Ultimately, studies call for field trials executed in the long term at greater depth and in different climates and representing different soil types. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Rural and Urban Environments)

► Show Figures

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Rural and Urban Environments

Share This Special Issue

Editor

Special Issue Information

Keywords

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

Published Papers (3 papers)

Research

Other

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI