Search Results (1,793)

Growing evidence suggests that urban greenery is associated with improved mental health, yet how eye-level exposure functions within specific socio-environmental contexts remains underexplored. This study presents an exploratory case study utilizing semantic segmentation of street-view imagery to quantify eye-level greenery (“open greenery”) across two contrasting community contexts: a densely developed area (Region 1) and a less developed area (Region 2) in Korea. Using interaction models reinforced by 5000-iteration bootstrap analyses, we identified the moderating role of greenery in the relationship between mental health (depression and cognitive function) and life satisfaction. Our findings indicate that the psychological benefits of greenery are highly contingent upon the interplay between individual vulnerability and regional context. Specifically, in Region 1, greenery moderated well-being for the low-cognitive function subgroup, while in Region 2, the moderating effect was most pronounced among individuals with depressive symptoms. Despite the inherent limitations of small subgroup samples, the stability of these patterns across repeated bootstrap iterations highlights meaningful “spatial intersections” where greenery plays a role in shaping psychological well-being. By adopting a case-centric approach, this study highlights that the benefits of street-view greenery are not uniform but context-dependent. These results underscore the necessity of context-aware green infrastructure strategies tailored to the specific environmental needs of vulnerable populations in diverse community settings. Full article

Disaster risk reduction, both natural and man-made, is a global priority and is in line with the goals of the 2030 Agenda, defined on the basis of what happened at the beginning of the millennium, starting with the disaster in human lives caused by Katrina in New Orleans. However, there is a scientific gap between the level of risk and the planned risk mitigation measures, with the related training and exercise actions implemented before real-life emergencies happen. In the context of Transport Risk Analysis (TRA), the size of exposure (E), in particular its reduction through evacuation, has been little studied, unlike the dimensions of occurrence (O) and vulnerability (V). This study aims to provide a framework of the scientific literature on the risk exposure component (graphical abstract) in urban transport systems, focusing on four macro areas: planning process; training and exercises; advanced Transport System Models (TSM); and use of emerging ICT (e-ICT). The study has been carried out using forward snowball techniques on a selected sample of the literature. The final set of references comprises 165 publications: 149 retrieved from Scopus (including records assessed at abstract level) and 16 retrieved via Google Scholar and forward-citation snowballing. The publications are distributed across the four macro-areas as follows: 68 concern the planning process, 24 training and exercises, 61 advanced Transport System Models, and 12 the use of e-ICT. The four macro-areas were examined both individually and in their mutual intersections, since several publications address more than one area simultaneously. Each work was classified under its predominant area for tabulation purposes. The analysis shows that the literature examined provides unequal coverage of the four broad areas. Whilst contributions relating to the planning process and modeling are relatively well-established, the integration of ICT with advanced transport system models in the context of transport risk analysis remains extremely limited. Approaches based on forecasts for outdoor evacuation are largely absent, and research into training and drill activities lags behind that on planning models. The framework developed in this work is useful to researchers, policy makers and public sector technicians involved in emergency management, as it offers a clear framework to guide future work in both research and operational action. Full article

Rainfall-driven inlet clogging is a phenomenon where inlets of stormwater networks are covered with debris, fallen leaves, or trash flushed by street runoffs due to heavy rainfall. Surface runoffs are thus unable to enter sewer networks that are still under capacity, leading to greater flood risks. To provide a feasible way to reflect such inlet clogging in pluvial urban inundation modeling, a new event-based reverse computing approach using simulated and surveyed data is proposed. The performance of this approach in the aspect of accuracy improvement is then discovered in a flood-vulnerable area. The optimal way for delineating clogged inlets is first explored. Next, the possible range of clogging factors used to represent capacity-reduced effects in inlets is decided by comparing the simulated and reverse-computed flood volumes. The impact of inlet clogging on urban inundation physics is also assessed. The results indicate that, for the study site, considering inlets surrounded by trees to be 10–40% clogged (median of 25%) will increase overall accuracy. Furthermore, inlet clogging reduces drained discharges entering sewer networks, thereby increasing surface water volumes by about 10–20%, diminishing spurious sewer surcharge, and decreasing sewer water depths. Interestingly, greater drained discharges are found in clogged inlets at local depressions, even though most clogged inlets have smaller drained discharges. In summary, the present approach is demonstrated to be a useful tool to account for rainfall-driven inlet clogging in urban inundation modeling. Full article

Climate adaptation in high-density cities requires equitable access to cooling and habitat benefits from blue–green infrastructure (BGI). However, the critical thresholds where human activity overwhelms these services remain unknown. Taking Shenzhen as a case study, we quantified habitat quality using the InVEST model and divided the urban landscape into low-, medium-, and high-quality zones. After screening significant drivers via multiple linear regression, we compared six machine learning algorithms and selected XGBoost (for low- and medium-quality zones) and LightGBM (for high-quality zones) with Optuna-tuned hyperparameters, then applied SHAP dependence analysis to identify nonlinear, threshold-driven responses. We identify a systemic thermal threshold of 23.7 °C. Above this temperature, BGI cooling efficiency decouples from habitat quality. We also quantify actionable intervention windows. Low-quality habitats—dominated by dense residential areas—collapse when building density exceeds 0.7 or road density exceeds 0.009. Medium-quality habitats offer a balance window (core area > 2844 m², building density < 0.361) that enables incidental nature contact during daily travel. High-quality refugia require a core area > 8600 m² with near-zero disturbance. These thresholds expose a stark green inequity: socioeconomically vulnerable groups in low-quality zones are systematically disconnected from cooling services. We translate these findings into a tiered spatial intervention framework—restoration, accessibility enhancement, and strict protection—to advance climate-resilient and socially equitable urban planning. Full article

Anthropogenic pressures increasingly threaten ecological connectivity and basin-scale ecological sustainability in peri-urban landscapes. This study proposes a Hybrid Ecological Typology framework for the Büyükçekmece Lake Basin (Istanbul, Türkiye), integrating Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Minimum Cumulative Resistance (MCR) analysis within a unified spatial decision-support system. The framework is applied to a 67,627.06 ha basin area, including a 25,976.99 ha terrestrial focus area. The results indicate a structurally heterogeneous landscape dominated by interior habitat zones (85.94%) distributed across 93 core patches. Despite this dominance, ecological connectivity is maintained through a highly fragmented network of 484 landscape elements, where limited bridge (0.08%) and branch (0.62%) structures highlight structural vulnerability. Edge-dominated zones (12.87%) further reflect strong anthropogenic fragmentation pressures. Connectivity analysis identifies 10 key habitat patches with dPC (Probability of Connectivity index) values exceeding 5% and 12 strategic ecological corridors supporting basin-scale ecological flows. The proposed hybrid typology delineates five functional planning categories: conservation areas (22.72%), ecological corridors (1.91%), restoration areas (1.63%), sustainable use areas (0.51%), and controlled development areas (8.11%). Although high-quality habitat cores dominate the basin, ecological connectivity remains spatially constrained, with bottleneck zones (0.89%) concentrated along transportation corridors that significantly reduce landscape permeability. Overall, the findings demonstrate that basin-scale ecological sustainability in peri-urban environments is governed not only by habitat quantity but also by the interaction between spatial configuration and resistance structures. The framework provides a transferable decision-support tool that bridges landscape ecology theory with spatial planning practice for basin management and ecological network design. Full article

Urban green spaces are increasingly recognized as cooling infrastructure for climate resilience, environmental health, and spatial equity. However, their planning value depends not only on where green spaces are located but also on whether cooling supply is translated into lower thermal pressure and aligned with heat-sensitive demand. This study examines blue–green–gray infrastructure cooling supply, thermal regulation, human-relevant thermal pressure, and supply–demand mismatch across 1385 census tracts in Maryland, USA. An Infrastructure Cooling Supply Index (ICSI) was constructed from green, blue, and gray infrastructure components and evaluated against maximum land surface temperature (LSTmax), Heat Index, extreme heat days, and a Human-Relevant Thermal Pressure Index (HTPI) integrating ambient heat intensity and recurrent extreme heat exposure. Explainable machine learning was used to identify the relative contributions of individual infrastructure components, and cooling supply was compared with socially differentiated heat-sensitive demand. The results show that higher ICSI is significantly associated with lower LSTmax, Heat Index, and HTPI. The association was strongest for surface thermal conditions, remained significant for Heat Index and integrated human-relevant thermal pressure, and was comparatively weaker for recurrent extreme heat days, indicating that infrastructure cooling supply affects thermal outcomes through distinct pathways. Cooling supply was also spatially uneven, with stronger provision generally associated with greater vegetation and tree-canopy coverage, higher park provision, larger water-area proportions, and lower gray-infrastructure pressure. Explainable GeoAI results identify impervious cover, tree canopy, water-area proportion, road density, and park provision as the principal contributors to tract-level thermal pressure. The mismatch analysis identifies 433 census tracts, or 31.3% of all Maryland tracts, as low-supply–high-demand priority areas. These tracts reveal substantial spatial convergence among elevated heat-sensitive demand, insufficient cooling infrastructure, and persistent thermal pressure. This study provides a tract-level approach for targeting cooling interventions where thermal pressure, vulnerability, and infrastructure deficits converge. Full article

The Ecological Security Pattern (ESP), composed of ecological sources, resistance surfaces, and corridors, provides a spatial basis for mitigating urban landscape fragmentation and sustaining ecological security. However, most urban ESP studies have focused on its spatial delimitation, while the assessment of network vulnerability under disturbance remains limited. This study applies an integrated, exploratory, and model-based methodological framework that combines ESP mapping, ecological network analysis, attack simulation, and load–capacity cascading failure modelling to generate simulated indications of the potential vulnerability of the urban ecological network of Bogota. The results identified 58 ecological sources with a combined area of 123.02 km² (19.58% of the study area) and 107 active corridors. In the simulations, sources N540, N433, and N847 showed the highest topological relevance, whereas sources N933, N337, and N847 concentrated the greatest functional importance. In the disturbance simulations, the network showed greater relative robustness to random removals; in contrast, degree- and betweenness-targeted removals produced a more accelerated loss of the connected component, whereas degree- and PageRank-based perturbations accelerated simulated functional degradation. In the dynamic scenario analyzed, the model organized the network into four risk levels and suggested indirect and multi-stage trajectories of simulated potential failure propagation. These findings contribute to the exploratory diagnosis of ESP functional vulnerability and provide preliminary, simulation-based spatial criteria to guide exploratory ecological prioritization analyses and scenario assessment in Bogotá and dense Global South metropolises. Full article

Urban hillside areas concentrate hydrological and geotechnical risks intensified by accelerated urbanization and climate change. Although Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly recognized as promising strategies for urban resilience, their application in hillside environments remains limited in scientific literature. This study integrates bibliometric analysis and a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) based on searches conducted across Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science from 2020 to 2025. Of the 4435 retrieved publications, only 92 addressed the association between NbS, hydrological modeling, and urban hillside environments. This reduction suggests that research integrating these themes remains limited within the adopted search criteria. The results demonstrate that hillside occupation in the Global South is conditioned by socio-spatial inequality, increasing exposure to landslides, erosion, and hydrological hazards. NbS were shown to reduce runoff peaks and contribute to slope stabilization when strategically positioned and adapted to slope gradient and hydrological connectivity; however, their effectiveness depends on continuous maintenance and monitoring. Comparative assessment indicates that most hydrological models are still applied in isolation, limiting the representation of coupled infiltration, soil saturation, and subsurface instability processes. The results indicate that effective NbS implementation in urban hillside areas requires integrated modeling approaches, interdisciplinary frameworks, and risk-oriented urban planning, particularly in socio-environmentally vulnerable contexts. Full article

Under the context of global climate change, extreme droughts constrain sustainable development in arid and semi-arid regions of Northwest China. This study took 22 counties in Ningxia as research units and established urban resilience and drought risk evaluation systems. The urban resilience evaluation system includes economy, society, ecology, infrastructure and governance, while the drought risk evaluation system covers hazard factors, vulnerability of the disaster-forming environment and exposure of hazard-affected bodies. It applied an entropy method, improved coupling coordination degree model and obstacle degree model to examine their coupling coordination and key obstacles from 2015 to 2022. The results were as follows. First, the overall urban resilience of county-level regions in Ningxia increased steadily from 2015 to 2022, with an average annual growth rate of 7.32%, while drought risk showed phased fluctuation. Second, the coupling coordination degree between urban resilience and drought risk generally evolved from a relatively high level to a high level, with an average annual growth rate of 2.39%. Its spatial distribution also exhibited marked county-level differences. Crucially, this elevated coordination represents optimized structural balance and narrowed gaps in relative development levels between the two systems, rather than an automatic, synchronous improvement in absolute resilience or risk mitigation. Third, the key factors restricting improvements in coupling coordination included land for cultivated land area, land for water conservancy facilities and medical resources. At the criterion layer, exposure of hazard-affected bodies was the primary obstacle. The findings imply that despite higher system coordination, resilience enhancement and risk prevention do not progress in a fully synchronized manner, remaining constrained by structural bottlenecks like resource endowments and public services. Therefore, tailored disaster-specific governance and operations are highly required for sustainable county-level development. Full article

China’s 2026 land-use policy mandates that commercial and residential construction remain within existing urban footprints, making urban renewal the primary source of spatial capacity for future urban development. Understanding how diverse stakeholders make decisions regarding urban renewal and shape the resulting spatial configurations is therefore of critical importance. This study develops an integrated multi-agent system (MAS) and cellular automata (CA) model to simulate the spatial dynamics of urban renewal. The model explicitly incorporates the location preferences of three key agents—government, developers, and residents. Using Wuhan as a case study, we project land-use patterns for 2035 under three scenarios: a traditional development scenario, a multi-agent simulation (MAS) scenario, and an urban renewal scenario. The findings reveal that (1) urban renewal significantly improves land-use patterns by curbing urban expansion and reducing the loss of farmland and forest cover; (2) government agents exert the strongest driving force on construction land expansion (contribution coefficient: 0.1758), while residents demonstrate a discernible influence on the selection of renewal sites (0.1199), with developer preferences largely aligning with government priorities; (3) a marked preference divergence exists among agents—within central urban areas, resident selection probabilities are only 60–70% of those of government and developers, indicating a notable mismatch between market demand and planning objectives. Moreover, more than 74% of renewal areas are projected to generate economic returns below renewal costs, signaling a potential financial sustainability risk. These results suggest that while urban renewal can effectively slow urban sprawl and mitigate ecological land loss, it simultaneously necessitates multi-stakeholder governance frameworks and sustainable financing mechanisms to reconcile competing interests and reduce fiscal vulnerabilities. The proposed simulation framework offers quantitative support for spatial policy making in China’s future land stock-constrained urban development contexts. Full article

South Africa has implemented an extensive social grant system to improve the wellbeing of vulnerable households. However, evidence remains limited regarding the pathways through which social grants are associated with household food insecurity and whether these relationships vary across geographical contexts of South Africa. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for designing more effective and spatially targeted social protection policies. This study examined the relationship between social grant receipt and household food insecurity, hypothesizing that household income serves as the principal pathway linking social grants to food insecurity. This study used nationally representative data from the 2024 General Household Survey. A latent food insecurity index was constructed using a two-parameter logistic Item Response Theory model, and a moderated-mediation structural equation model was employed to decompose the association between social grant receipt and food insecurity into direct and indirect components while accounting for geographic heterogeneity. The results indicate that social grants are strongly targeted toward households with higher levels of food insecurity and lower incomes, confirming that grant recipients are among the most vulnerable households in South Africa. Household income was negatively associated with food insecurity and mediated 55.4% of the total association between social grant receipt and household food insecurity. This underscores income as the main transmission pathway. High geographic heterogeneity was observed. The indirect income-mediated association was strongest in commercial farming areas, followed by urban and rural areas administered by local leaders. The direct association was significant in urban and rural areas administered by local leaders. These results show that the effectiveness of income transfers depends on the household’s demographic and socioeconomic conditions. The findings suggest that although social grants play an important role in reducing household vulnerability, cash support alone is insufficient to address household food insecurity among disadvantaged households in South Africa. Therefore, strengthening income support provided through social grants should be complemented by location-specific interventions that expand employment opportunities, improve market access, promote productive asset accumulation, and strengthen local food systems, particularly in rural areas where constraints continue to limit household food security. Full article

The analysis of earthquake-induced damage scenarios at the urban scale is a fundamental tool for seismic risk assessment and mitigation and the management of urbanized areas exposed to seismic hazards. This paper presents a methodology for simulating earthquake damage scenarios over large urban territories that explicitly accounts for the cumulative effects of seismic sequences. The proposed approach models the progressive accumulation of structural damage and the resulting evolution of building vulnerability under repeated seismic loading. From a complex systems perspective, the methodology describes urban areas as collections of buildings whose vulnerability evolves through memory-dependent processes. Under this framework, the final damage scenario emerges from the cumulative effects of the entire seismic history rather than from the contribution of individual earthquakes considered in isolation. The study extends previous work by the authors, in which instrumentally derived macroseismic intensity maps were integrated with observed building damage data from the 2009 L’Aquila seismic sequence. The results demonstrated that the methodology could successfully reproduce the spatial distribution of observed damage when considering not only the mainshock but also all seismic events exceeding a selected magnitude threshold. In this contribution, new developments of the calibration procedure are presented, together with applications to the 2013 Garfagnana-Lunigiana and the 2016–2017 Central Italy seismic sequences. Through a comparative analysis of these case studies, the influence of different seismic sequence characteristics and building stock features on damage evolution is investigated. The results provide further insight into the capabilities and limitations of the proposed methodology, highlighting its potential as a tool for interpreting post-earthquake damage patterns and supporting seismic risk assessment and mitigation strategies. Full article

Wildfires are an increasing threat to Mediterranean ecosystems and populated areas. This study proposes an innovative static wildfire risk assessment methodology for the Apulia Region (southern Italy). The framework produces a Fire Risk Global Index (FRGi) by spatially combining two sub-indices related to risk, which are hazard and vulnerability, in line with European Community and United Nations guidelines. Hazard is quantified through five sub-indices—vegetational, historical, climatic, morphological, and anthropogenic—combined into a Long-Term Danger Index (LTDi). Vulnerability integrates ecological, economic, and wildland-urban interface components into a Fire Vulnerability Index (FVi). All processing was performed in an open-source GIS environment (QGIS) at a spatial resolution of 20 m, ensuring full reproducibility for public administrations. Preliminary validation confirms the internal consistency of the model, demonstrating a statistically significant relationship between risk classes and historical fire occurrence. Beyond its scientific contribution, the methodology serves as an operational tool for civil protection planning at the regional scale. Full article

The 21st century is defined by converging anthropogenic and biophysical stressors. This study assessed the vulnerability of the endemic specialist lizard Liolaemus multimaculatus and the habitat generalist L. wiegmannii to climate change and land-use/land-cover (LULC) transformation within the Pampean Eastern Dune Barrier up to 2050. Using satellite data, LULC spatial projections, and ecological niche models (ENMs), we quantified habitat dynamics and projected future climatic suitability. Historical analysis (1994–2022) revealed a 20% retraction of active dunes driven by exotic afforestation and urban growth. Projections for 2050 indicate an intensification of these trends, with urban areas accounting for nearly 26% of the regional territory, leading to an additional 17% loss of active dunes. Abundance modeling predicted a decline in L. multimaculatus within the remaining active dunes, while ENMs projected a near-total contraction of climatically suitable areas. Crucially, these correlative models may overlook potential physiological or behavioral adjustments; however, the limited dispersal capacity and physical landscape barriers inherent to this specialist likely preclude effective niche tracking. These findings confirm that ecological specialization heightens sensitivity to global change, creating a “double threat” for endemic species. Protecting remnant active dune patches is essential to mitigate the projected collapse of these range-restricted lineages. Full article

Urban public parks are vital for recreation, public health, environmental quality, and sustainable urban growth. Yet access to these parks remains uneven across many cities, disproportionately affecting low-income, marginalised, and spatially segregated communities. This study systematically examines socio-spatial disparities in park access and their implications for spatial justice. Using the PRISMA 2020 framework, 108 peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2025 were analysed through thematic narrative synthesis. The results identify key factors shaping accessibility disparities, including socio-economic status, residential location, race and ethnicity, transport infrastructure, urban form, governance, and demographic vulnerability. The most common determinants were socio-economic status (24%), residential location and spatial distribution (20%), race and ethnicity (18%), and urban form and transport systems (17%). Limited park access exacerbates socio-economic inequality, worsens environmental injustice, contributes to health gaps, reinforces spatial segregation, hampers urban sustainability, and marginalises vulnerable populations. The review integrates Spatial Justice Theory, Environmental Justice Theory, and Urban Political Ecology into a comprehensive analytical framework and introduces a conceptual model linking accessibility factors to spatial justice outcomes. These findings underscore the importance of equitable green infrastructure planning, inclusive governance, and improved access in underserved urban areas. Full article