Urbanised landscapes are expanding at unprecedented rates while extreme climate events intensify, exposing billions of urban residents to risk of extreme heat, flooding, and environmental degradation. Green and blue urban infrastructure (trees, parks, lakes, and other vegetated or water-based systems) can help mitigate these impacts through mechanisms like transpirational cooling, filtering of particulate matter, and stormwater management. But urban vegetation itself is highly vulnerable to extreme climate events, hampering their ecosystem services. To guide sustainable urban development, we need a better understanding of the dynamics of the water cycle and energy balance in urban settings.
This session invites all research in urban environmental science from plant physiology to hydrology, from built to natural ecosystems, and across all methods of investigation. We aim at advancing our understanding of (1) the interactions between climate and vegetation in cities worldwide (2) strategies for optimizing the costs of urban ecosystems (e.g., irrigation, planting and removal) alongside their benefits (e.g., heat island mitigation, air quality amelioration and runoff reduction), and (3) the constraints that extreme urban climate places on urban vegetation and approaches to enhance the resilience of cities to such events.