Built environment influences on urban climate resilience: Evidence from extreme heat events in Macau

Urban ecosystem services, ecological security patterns and ecological resilience in coastal cities: The impact of land reclamation in Macao SAR

Land reclamation from the sea is a common practice to create territorial space and accommodate urbanisation in coastal cities. However, previous studies did not adequately examine the changes in ecosystem service values, the spatial transformation of the ecological network and the ecological resilience at an urban scale in the context of land reclamation. This study uses Macao SAR, a fully urbanised city with two-thirds of its land reclaimed from the sea, as a case study. We quantify urban ecosystem services (UES) values and model the spatial transformation of the ecological security patterns (ESPs) throughout the city's land reclamation history from 2000 to 2020. Subsequently, we evaluate the resilience of the ESPs' components and their relationships with urbanisation by using spatial element elasticity indices and regression analysis. Results show that urban land expanded by 27% through land reclamation, increasing the value of UES by 13%. The growth rates of different categories of UES vary significantly. ESPs extended over the newly reclaimed and urbanised lands, but the resilience levels of ecological sources, corridors and nodes decreased. There is a strong positive correlation between UES values and urbanisation, and a strong negative correlation between ecological resilience and urbanisation. This study recommends five specific environmental spatial planning and management strategies to address the expansion and integration of ESPs, aiming not only to provide ecological services but also to enhance ecological resilience in coastal cities.

Spatiotemporal differentiation and influencing factors of the degree of resilience coupling coordination in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, China

Urban agglomeration system resilience involves multiple subsystems that are interconnected and interactive, and exploring the relationships among subsystems can elucidate and increase urban agglomeration resilience. This study constructed a social-economic-built environment resilience model and proposed a social-economic-built environment resilience index system. Using the entropy weight method, the coupling coordination degree (CCD) model, GeoDetector, spatial autocorrelation analysis and the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA) model, the resilience development level of the Beijing‒Tianjin‒Hebei (BTH) region from 2000 to 2020 was evaluated, the main influencing factors for the spatiotemporal differentiation pattern were identified, and the development levels in 2030 and 2050 were predicted. The results show that (1) high-resilience and high-CCD regions are concentrated in the region of Beijing and Tianjin in the centre, and low-value regions are concentrated in the districts and counties in the west and south; (2) economic elements, especially the economic aggregate status of a region as a whole, are the main factors contributing to the differences in resilience levels between regions, but their influence gradually decreases; and (3) the gap between the CCDs of Beijing, Tianjin and cities in Hebei increased from 2000 to 2020, but this gap is expected to narrow by 2030 and 2050. On this basis, five categories of future development guidelines for cities in the BTH region are proposed.

Addressing land use planning: A methodology for assessing pre- and post-landslide event urban configurations

With urban areas projected to accommodate 68 % of the global population by 2050, the imperative for inclusive, safe, and sustainable cities becomes paramount. In the timeline of urban centers, landslides represent one of the most destructive phenomena, involving several resources allocation with private and public investments, sometimes claiming human lives. By synergically connecting environmental, planning, and configurational spheres, this study seeks to support the proactive management of landslide risk. The proposed three-step methodology allowed to quantify the environmental features involved in landslide occurrence, evaluate planning framework vulnerabilities, and suggest alternative configurations for urban areas that experienced landslides. The methodology has been applied to the case study involving a tragic landslide in Casamicciola Terme (Italy) in November 2022. First, the stream network and the drainage basin corresponding to confluence point of the landslide into the sea have been calculated (environmental elaborations). Subsequently, these elaborations have been overlapped with the runoff mitigation and the sediment deposition layers, extracted through the INVEST software. Secondly, the reconnaissance of the local and superordinate planning levels has been realized, to deepen planning tools cogency on the study area, contextually deepening the constraints that characterize it. From the overlapping of these two steps, free landslide risk areas have been located. Finally, based on the available territorial surface (Sta) and the territorial cover ratio (Rct), two territorial configuration scenarios have been proposed, envisaging the relocation of the buildings involved into the landslide. Results show that landslide originated by three out of five gullies. Some portions of the urban areas of Casamicciola Terme are still under high and very high hydrogeological risk. Contextually, it emerges poor attention from the local planners to the superordinate planning framework. Historic settlement has an Rct of 33.64 %, while areas in which relocate the built up show an Rct of 32,45 % for scenario 1 and 27,9 % for scenario 2. The methodology resulted useful to address planning vulnerabilities, supporting the realization of alternative configurational scenarios. We expect our research to contribute to the evolving field of disaster risk reduction, by providing a systematic approach to manage landslide risk.