Search Results (5,608)

Urban expansion generates habitat fragmentation, light pollution, and vegetation loss, driving biodiversity decline globally. Insectivorous bats are particularly suited to track these changes: their taxonomic and functional diversity, combined with their differential sensitivity to landscape configuration and roost availability, makes them reliable bioindicators of urbanization impacts. This study characterized bat acoustic diversity and community composition along an urban–rural gradient in Tacna, Peru, using passive acoustic monitoring. Twenty-three stations equipped with autonomous ultrasonic recorders were established between December 2024 and April 2025. Sonotype identification was validated through linear discriminant analysis (DFA), achieving 94.47% accuracy by Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV). Nine sonotypes were identified, seven Molossidae and two Vespertilionidae; Myotis atacamensis showed the highest detection frequency across all districts. Diversity indices were highest in the peri-urban zone of Pocollay (S = 8; H′ = 1.664) and lowest in Gregorio Albarracín (S = 4; H′ = 0.964). The high dissimilarity between Pachía and the urban core of Tacna (BC = 0.817) points to marked compositional differences linked to urbanization intensity. Records of Nyctinomops laticaudatus and N. macrotis constitute the first documentation for the urban area of Tacna. These results suggest urban and peri-urban sectors may function as ecological oases for bat sonotypes within a hyperarid matrix, providing a baseline for evaluating the role of green spaces, landscape connectivity, and artificial lighting in arid cities. Full article

Urban green-space provision depends not only on green quantity but also on how greenery is positioned relative to buildings as urban form evolves. However, most existing assessments aggregate greenery within predefined spatial units and rely on static snapshots, thereby obscuring both its distance-sensitive distribution around buildings and its variation across urban-development trajectories. This study develops a Supply–Form framework to examine this relationship across heterogeneous development trajectories. Using multi-temporal very-high-resolution imagery from Beijing and Tianjin, we introduce Quantified Green-Space Supply (QGS), a distance-weighted indicator that accumulates greenery around buildings over nested ranges of 5–2000 m. Building-expansion trajectories are then linked to evolution-stratified XGBoost models interpreted with consensus-grouped Partition SHAP, allowing recurrent morphological groups and their within-group contributions to be compared across contexts. QGS was more strongly associated with the selected urban-form variables than conventional green coverage ($R^2=0.717$ versus $0.633$). Both cities showed higher mean QGS in 2022 than in 2012, but their internal patterns diverged: Beijing developed more continuous central low-QGS clusters, whereas Tianjin’s central cold spots contracted and fragmented. Across 15 trajectory-specific models, building density was the leading morphological group in 12, while the importance of patch size, edge structure, aggregation–adjacency, and spatial configuration varied by trajectory. Nonlinear responses showed a stable positive association for building density, diminishing returns for edge density and dispersion, adverse effects at very high adjacency, and intermediate-range benefits for patch dominance and compactness. The framework advances green-space assessment from aggregate greenness mapping to a relational, trajectory-conditioned diagnosis of potential surrounding green-space supply, providing a basis for context-sensitive urban renewal. Full article

Fine-scale site selection of urban parks serves as a core measure to guarantee spatial equity of public service spaces for residents and advance the sustainable development of urban ecological spaces. Among relevant tasks, balancing the supply and demand of green spaces stands out as an essential foundation for maintaining long-term stability of urban human well-being and ecosystems. Green-space supply is defined as the stock of various existing urban parks within the city, while green-space demand is quantified via grids generated based on residential communities in Changsha. Existing research on urban park site selection lacks a full-process coupled framework, fails to accommodate differentiated layout demands for multi-level parks, and struggles to reconcile the sustainable operation and long-term ecological empowerment of urban green-space systems. Taking the main urban area of Changsha as the research scope, this study divides the study area into grid units to analyze the spatial differentiation of green-space accessibility and identify service blind zones. The XGBoost model is adopted to predict areas suitable for green-space construction, and the NSGA-III algorithm is applied to realize collaborative multi-objective optimization covering service efficiency, ecological benefits, and land development costs. The results reveal that the 15-min walking coverage of community parks in central Changsha only reaches 57.29%. Respectively, 34.52% and 41.04% of residential communities record accessibility levels below the municipal average of urban parks and forest parks, with prominent shortages of green-space supply in peripheral urban areas. This study optimizes and screens twenty-eight candidate sites for community parks, twelve candidate sites for urban parks, and eight candidate sites for forest parks. The proposed scheme effectively narrows the gap in green-space accessibility across the whole city and coordinates ecological conservation with land development costs. Compared with research relying on a single model or two-stage coupling frameworks, this paper constructs a systematic workflow spanning supply–demand status assessment to multi-objective layout decision-making, enabling differentiated optimized layout of multi-tiered parks. The integrated framework effectively enhances the spatial resilience and resource utilization efficiency of urban green-space systems, facilitates high-quality and sustainable upgrading of urban living environments, and provides a referable innovative approach for multi-level urban park arrangement and refined multi-objective planning. Full article

European urban policy increasingly requires city benchmarks that are people-centred, multidimensional and methodologically defensible, yet perception-based environmental evidence is rarely aggregated without arbitrary weighting. Accordingly, this paper develops and justifies a synthetic index of perceived urban environmental performance (UEP) for European cities. Specifically, using the environmental module of the 2023 Eurostat Urban Audit Perception Survey (UAPS) for 83 Functional Urban Areas (FUAs), four satisfaction indicators (air quality, noise, cleanliness and green spaces) are aggregated with a benefit-of-the-doubt (BoD) composite indicator that assigns each city endogenous, self-favouring weights. Standard, weight-restricted and cross-efficiency variants are estimated, benchmarked against an equal-weight comparator, and embedded in an exploratory spatial data analysis. The results demonstrate that nine cities form the efficient frontier, led by Oulu, Luxembourg and Zurich, while Skopje, Naples and Athens anchor the lower tail. Additionally, a robust North–South gradient emerges, and green space satisfaction is the dominant structural driver of composite scores, partially compensating weak air quality in many cities. The study addresses perception-based BoD benchmarking—uncovering dimension-specific environmental governance deficits masked by national indicators—and complements objective environmental monitoring for European Union (EU) cohesion and climate-neutrality policy. Full article

Riparian landscapes in peri-urban floodplains are important components of urban green infrastructure, but urbanization is eroding their capacity to support ecosystem services. This study examined the implications of riparian landscape change for ecosystem service capacity and developed spatially explicit recommendations to inform land use planning in Shanghai’s peri-urban fringe. A multi-scale landscape metric-based proxy assessment was applied to characterize changes in landscape composition and configuration at the regional and riparian buffer scales. From 2000 to 2020, the study area underwent pronounced land use change: the dominant land use type shifted from agricultural land (59.16%) to built-up land (67.69%), while 28% of water area and 57% of vegetated land were converted to other uses. Landscape metrics indicated a systemic shift toward fragmentation, characterized by higher patch density, smaller mean patch size, lower largest-patch and Contagion Indices, and simpler patch geometries. Changes within riparian buffers further indicated an overall decline in the potential capacity to provide provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services. By integrating landscape composition and configuration across spatial scales, the proposed framework links regional land use control with site-scale riparian design and provides an adaptable basis for sustaining ecosystem services in rapidly urbanizing floodplain and deltaic cities. Full article

Green Production and Lifestyles (GPL) are essential for advancing green development and sustainable development. However, limited attention has been paid to their integrated transformation and the combined effects of social governance-oriented and environmental technology-oriented policies. This study examines the effects of the Dual Pilot Policy (DP) of the National Civilized City Program and the Low-Carbon City Pilot Policy on urban GPL transition. Using balanced panel data from 276 prefecture-level cities in China during 2002–2023, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model. The results show that the DP significantly increases the GPL index by 0.0367 units, equivalent to a 3.67% improvement on a 0–1 scale. The DP generates a stronger additional combined effect than individual policies, while “Civilized City first, followed by Low-Carbon City” produces a stronger effect. The effects are more pronounced in non-resource-based cities, non-old industrial base cities, cities outside the Yangtze River Basin, and coastal cities. Mediation analysis identifies government support, industrial structure upgrading, and public GPL awareness as important channels, while significant spatial spillover effects are also observed. These findings provide empirical evidence for optimizing policy combinations. Full article

Sustainable urban development is increasingly shaped by the joint evolution of social development, ecological conditions, and technological capacity. Understanding how these dimensions are associated with green economic efficiency (GEE) is therefore important for advancing urban green transition. This study examines GEE from a social–ecological–technological (S–E–T) systems perspective and incorporates spatial dependence into the empirical framework. Using panel data for 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2022, this study measures GEE with a Super-SBM model, characterizes its spatiotemporal evolution, and estimates a two-way fixed-effects spatial Durbin model to distinguish local and cross-city associations. The results show that: (1) urban GEE improved overall, while maintaining a clear southeast-high and northwest-low spatial gradient; (2) regional disparities widened over time, and efficiency transitions exhibited strong path dependence and spatial neighborhood effects; (3) the spatial Durbin model is preferred over the SAR and SEM alternatives, indicating that both local conditions and geographically connected cities should be considered; (4) green patenting shows the most stable positive association with GEE, both locally and across connected cities; and (5) population density and ecological conditions display differentiated local and cross-city associations. These findings show that combining the S–E–T framework with spatial panel analysis provides a systematic approach for understanding urban GEE and offers evidence for coordinated green development policies across connected cities. Full article

Financial development can influence carbon emissions through capital allocation, technological support, and policy transmission. To investigate the inherent association between grassroots inclusive financial institutions and territorial green transformation, this study establishes a city-level panel dataset of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration covering the period from 2010 to 2022. Within the analytical framework of the Spatial Durbin Model, this research decomposes the baseline effect, functional transmission pathways, and cross-sectional heterogeneity of the impact of the development of small loan company (SLC) providers on urban carbon intensity. The results show that SLC expansion significantly increases local carbon emission intensity and produces spatial spillover effects across neighboring cities. Mechanism analysis indicates that SLCs increase emissions mainly by supporting the expansion of small- and micro-sized enterprises in energy-intensive manufacturing sectors, while their role in promoting green technological innovation remains limited. Further analysis shows that local government willingness to pursue green transition weakens the carbon-increasing effect of SLCs, whereas digital inclusive finance strengthens it. The effect also varies by location and regulatory environment, with stronger effects in medium-distance cities and under lower regulatory intensity. These findings reveal how grassroots inclusive financial institutions affect regional carbon outcomes and offer policy implications for aligning inclusive finance with green transition goals. This paper innovatively transcends the conventional low-carbon research paradigm focusing on macro-finance and large formal financial institutions, and instead takes SLCs, a typical micro-level inclusive finance entity, to explore their unique paths affecting regional carbon emissions, and clarifies their action boundaries from multiple dimensions including government governance and digital finance empowerment, which enriches interdisciplinary research literature integrating inclusive finance and low-carbon economy. But this study has limitations: its sample is limited to the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, so the universality of the conclusion needs further verification. This research provides theoretical support and policy reference for regulating the sustainable development of the small loan industry, promoting the integration of inclusive finance and green low-carbon transformation, and advancing high-quality regional low-carbon development. Full article

Although conventionally quantified as an urban–rural thermal anomaly, urban heat islands are systematic expressions of development choices that shape unequal exposures and health risks across cities. This article develops an integrated urban development-health framework explaining how imperviousness, vegetation deficit, landscape configuration, urban morphology, thermally absorptive materials and nocturnal heat retention connect heat exposure with physical disease, mental well-being and climate-responsive planning. A critical integrative review reported using PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-ScR principles, organised evidence from urban climate, public health, environmental epidemiology and planning. The synthesis covers the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), Local Climate Zones (LCZs), sky-view factor (SVF), height-to-width ratio (H/W), land-surface temperature (LST), Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET), wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) and nocturnal minimum temperature, together with cardiovascular, respiratory, psychiatric, sleep, mortality and well-being outcomes. Six recurrent amplification pathways were identified: imperviousness and low canopy cover; nocturnal heat retention; social vulnerability; blue-green and cool infrastructure; heat–pollution–humidity interaction; and sleep/mental-health disruption. The Urban Heat-Health Development Index (UHHDI) and Urban Heat-Health Amplification Pattern (UHHAP) are proposed as transparent, review-derived tools for urban diagnosis and policy prioritisation. A Spanish/Mediterranean climatic-zone transition analysis illustrates how future climatic severity can be translated into planning-relevant exposure potential. The findings support a shift from simply describing urban heat to diagnosing development-driven heat-health risk, with implications for urban regeneration, thermal justice, public-health adaptation and healthy-city governance. Full article

Zero-waste city (ZWC) construction serves as a vital approach to regional sustainable development amid tightening resource constraints and the dual carbon goals. Examining its impact on urban green development efficiency (UGDE) and the underlying transmission mechanisms bears important theoretical significance and practical value. Drawing on panel data covering 281 Chinese cities from 2008 to 2024, this study adopts the difference-in-differences model to examine how the zero-waste city pilot (ZWCP) policy affects UGDE. The main findings are summarized as follows. (1) ZWCP policy significantly improves UGDE, and this core conclusion remains robust after multiple robustness tests and endogeneity corrections. (2) Mechanism tests confirm that ZWCP elevates the green development efficiency of pilot cities through two intermediate channels: green industrial agglomeration and public environmental awareness. (3) The ZWCP policy exerts positive spatial spillover effects on UGDE improvement. However, the two transmission mechanisms show heterogeneous spatial linkage effects. Green industrial agglomeration acts as the core channel for policy spatial radiation, with inter-city agglomeration diffusion driving UGDE growth in neighboring cities. In contrast, public environmental awareness only exerts a local mediating effect, with no significant spatial spillover on UGDE. (4) The moderation analysis reveals that government environmental attention (GEA) strengthens both transmission paths, exerting a positive moderating effect on the UGDE promotion of ZWCP. (5) Heterogeneous results indicate that the policy’s boosting effect is more pronounced in eastern regions, resource-based cities and highly urbanized cities. These findings provide empirical evidence and targeted policy references for advancing urban green development efficiency via the differentiated implementation of zero-waste city initiatives across China. They also offer practical Chinese insights for other developing economies pursuing green urban transition. Full article

Although rooftop greenhouse buildings (RGBs) have become multifunctional urban infrastructures that turn roofs into productive land, their commercial spread across cities remains highly uneven. This study examines that unevenness by reframing RGB diffusion as a land-use transition pathway shaped by the interplay of economic demand pull and institutional readiness. It develops this account as a proposition-generating typology rather than a statistical test. Methodologically, the study combines a qualitative thematic synthesis of the RGB literature with a comparative narrative analysis of seven cities across high- and middle-income tiers: New York, Paris, Singapore, Barcelona, Seoul, Bangkok, and Dhaka. The analysis describes an urban-agriculture intensification ladder on which high-intensity commercial RGBs emerge only above specific wealth thresholds. Linking this economic axis to two institutional channels—legal permanence and administrative agility—we construct a land-use typology in which a commercialization gate separates commercialized from research-stage RGBs. It also reveals South Korea as an institutional paradox, where world-class technology coexists with blocked regulatory channels. We conclude with a development-stage-differentiated, transferable land-use policy framework that helps planning authorities align institutional readiness with economic capacity while proactively mitigating green-equity risks. Full article

Digital technologies are reshaping the spatial organization of economic activities, expanding cities’ access to external innovation resources across geographical boundaries, and creating new pathways for sustainable urban development. Using panel data for 279 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2022, this study constructs an urban digital network based on the cross-city organizational linkages of listed digital firms and their subsidiaries and measures virtual agglomeration by combining network linkages with urban digital foundations. The results show that virtual agglomeration significantly promotes urban innovation, and this finding remains robust to instrumental-variable estimation, alternative measures, and lagged specifications. Virtual agglomeration also strengthens the ability of latecomer cities to translate innovation gaps into subsequent growth. Both local digital foundations and external digital linkages contribute to this effect, while knowledge-related variety serves as an important transmission channel. The positive relationship is more pronounced in resource-based, third-tier, non-urban-agglomeration, and western cities. Further analysis shows that virtual agglomeration significantly promotes urban green innovation, indicating that its innovation effect extends to environmentally oriented technological development. Overall, virtual agglomeration improves access to innovation resources, supports innovation catch-up in less-developed cities, and, by promoting green technological innovation, offers a digital-network-based pathway toward more coordinated and sustainable urban development. Full article

In the context of an increasingly tense relationship between environmental and economic goals, green innovation is of crucial importance for the global green transformation. However, its dual external effects often render a single policy tool ineffective, which makes the implementation of a policy mix necessary. In this study, according to a three-dimensional policy mix framework, four pilot policies in the fields of environment, innovation, and finance were selected and combined in pairs. Panel data from 276 Chinese cities (from 2006 to 2021) were used to compare the differences in the effects of different types of policy mixes on green innovation using the difference-in-differences method and to verify the mediating effects of green finance and university–industry collaboration. The synergy test results show that the cross-domain mix with the differentiation of tool types and the compatibility of mechanisms is the best. The policy effects were more evident in cities outside the Yangtze River Economic Belt and in non-central cities. These findings provide theoretical and practical insights for designing an effective policy mix to promote green transformation. Full article

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have emerged as a key strategy to address complex and intensifying urban sustainability challenges, yet empirical assessments of regulatory frameworks that operationalize these strategies remain limited. This study addresses that gap through an empirical evaluation of the Green Area Ratio (GAR), a hybrid performance-based zoning regulation for sustainable landscapes in Washington, DC, using more than a decade of regulatory implementation data. Regulatory plan approval records from 1329 private properties subject to GAR between 2015 and 2025 were analyzed to examine trends in landscaping Best Management Practice (BMP) selection, relationships with parcel characteristics, and interactions with stormwater management requirements. Over this period, approximately 184 ha of multifunctional NBS were approved through GAR plans primarily consisting of landscaping areas, plantings, and tree planting and preservation, often combined through BMP stacking and amplified by a native plant bonus. BMP selection varied significantly according to zoning district, lot area, and GAR Score Requirement. Importantly, GAR requirements influenced BMP selection differently than stormwater requirements. The findings suggest that simplicity, flexibility, and adaptability of the GAR make the regulation a versatile policy instrument for DC and a useful model for cities seeking to expand NBS through performance-based zoning regulation. Full article

Global water scarcity is mainly due to climate change, population growth, excessive use of water resources and inadequate water management. Alternative sources such as reusing greywater are promising in urban environments. In this context, phytoremediation, the direct use of plants to remove soil and water pollution, could be an encouraging alternative nature-based solution to traditional reuse methods. While constructed wetlands are the most common method for greywater phytoremediation, their limited feasibility in cities makes green roofs and walls a practical urban alternative. This review examines studies conducted over the last 20 years. The combination of greywater treatment through phytoremediation with urban greenery would help close the water cycle as well as make cities more sustainable. However, for this solution to be viable, several challenges must be addressed, including limited roof or wall surface area compared to traditional systems, the precise volume of water to be managed, and the selection of suitable substrates and plants essential for effective phytoremediation. This work reviews the main mechanisms and factors that drive the phytoremediation process in constructed wetlands, and based on this knowledge, delves into the challenges of applying this process to the urban context through green roofs and facades on buildings. Full article