Today, the Coalition for Urban Transitions releases a new report ‘Seizing the Urban Opportunity’, which provides insights from six emerging economies on how national governments can recover from COVID-19, tackle the climate crisis and secure shared prosperity through cities. Launching as a call to action for national governments ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, it builds on the Coalition’s flagship 2019 report: Climate Emergency, Urban Opportunity.

UNDP's "Peoples' Climate Vote" reflects over half the world's population after results processed by the University of Oxford. Sixty-four percent of people believe climate change is a global emergency, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) work with nature to benefit both natural ecosystems and the people that depend on them. By putting nature at the centre, NbS address a range of societal challenges: protecting, sustainably managing or restoring natural or modified ecosystems and supporting their health, function and biodiversity.

The research collated in this brief confirms that NbS deliver simultaneously multiple benefits and shows the wide-ranging beneficial impacts of scaling up their implementation across Europe.

The rise of urban populations has rendered cities in both developed and developing countries vulnerable to poor health and diseases that are associated with urban living conditions and environments. Therefore, there is a growing consensus that while personal factors are critical in determining health, the urban environment exacerbates or mitigates health outcomes, and as such the solution for improving health outcomes in urban settings can be found in addressing socio-environmental factors that shape urban environments.

Rapid economic development has a significant negative impact on the rural ecological environment. Evaluating the ecological environmental effect of land use and its change trend at the village scale has important practical significance for maintaining ecological functions and ensuring ecological safety. Taking a typical village in Yudian Town as an example, we applied a land-use ecological environment effect evaluation and the CA-Markov change trend prediction model and constructed an index of ecological environmental effect status.

The presence of land use conflicts is often unavoidable as land is finite and a scarce resource. With development as a prime goal, the increasing demands for specific uses make the situation more serious than it was before. In the context of land uses, suitability determines the inherent capacity of the land to perform a defined use with optimum efficiency and sustainability. However, single land use suitability analysis could not answer the overall objective of land allocation.

Understanding the dynamics of agricultural expansion, their drivers, and interactions is critical for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem-services provision, and the future sustainability of agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, there is limited understanding of the drivers of agricultural expansion. A systematic review of the drivers of agricultural expansion was conducted from 1970 to 2020 using Web of Science, Elsevier Scopus and Google Scholar. Two researchers reviewed the papers separately based on inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Agricultural land resources have been the central issue for the Chinese government in its attempts to secure food and agricultural sustainability. Yet strict land use control does not protect the agricultural land from erosion by urban expansion. Identifying the specific patterns and mechanisms of the agricultural land conversion, thus, is critical for land management and related decision making.

The intensified use of cultivated land is essential for optimizing crop planting practices and protecting food security. This study employed a telecoupling framework to evaluate the cultivated land use intensification rates in typical Chinese villages (village cultivated land use intensifications—VCLUIs). The pressure–state–response (PSR) model organizes the VCLUI indexes including the intensity press, output state, and structural response of cultivated land use.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) is an area sensitive to global climate change, and land use/land cover change (LUCC) plays a vital role in regulating climate system at different temporal and spatial scales. In this study, we analyzed the temporal and spatial trend of precipitation and the characteristics of LUCC on the QTP. Meanwhile, we also used the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as an indicator of LUCC to discuss the relationship between LUCC and precipitation.

Woodland expansion on a significant scale is widely seen to be critical if governments are to achieve their net zero greenhouse gas ambitions. The United Kingdom government is committed to expanding tree cover from 13% to at least 17% in order to achieve net zero by 2050. With much lowland area under agricultural production, woodland expansion may be directed to upland areas, many of which are national parks under some degree of conservation jurisdiction.

The expansion of urban areas around the world and the application of the sustainability paradigm to tourism discourses has favored an increase in the number of people visiting natural protected areas (NPAs) in their leisure time. While tourism is desired to boost the economy of destinations, mismanagement can bring negative consequences for social–ecological systems, particularly in post-conflict rural scenarios.