Climate change presents cities with multiple, interacting challenges, from intensifying heat waves and regional droughts to more extreme precipitation and sea level rise. Simultaneously, urban areas also cause persistent issues to their surrounding environments, such as air and water pollution, urban heat islands, expanding impervious areas, and biodiversity loss. Addressing these issues in isolation is neither sustainable nor efficient. Instead, cities need integrated strategies that maximize co-benefits and minimize trade-offs across sectors.

Nature-based solutions (NBS), which can be implemented through both infrastructure (e.g., blue-green infrastructure) and policy instruments, are especially promising in this regard. They deliver a wide range of ecosystem services, including stormwater management that improves water quality and reduces flood risk, climate regulation, enhanced air quality, protection of human health, and biodiversity restoration. However, their design and evaluation must carefully account for synergies and trade-offs across environmental, social, and economic objectives.

This session invites contributions that explore how multifunctional solutions can support urban adaptation while advancing broader sustainability goals. We welcome studies that employ integrated modeling, analyze multiple climate impacts simultaneously, or investigate the co-benefits and trade-offs of NBS in urban contexts. Interdisciplinary perspectives that bridge engineering, planning, ecology, and policy are especially encouraged.
By bringing together researchers and practitioners working across these domains, the session aims to advance understanding of how multifunctional solutions can transform urban adaptation from single-issue responses into holistic, resilient strategies.

Topics of Interest:
• Integrated modeling approaches for urban climate adaptation
• Quantitative assessments of multiple benefits of blue-green infrastructure and other NBS
• Trade-offs or synergies among water, heat, biodiversity, and other urban sustainability objectives
• Cross-cutting analyses of adaptation to multiple climate impacts on cities
• Consequences of policy changes across multiple urban sectors