Food, energy and water (FEW) are critical resources for sustainable development of our society. They are inextricably interrelated in a variety of forms at various scales. Each of them is significantly affected by the other two. Demands for these vital resources increase dynamically together with rapid socio-economic and population growth, which collectively complicate FEW resource management problems. Effective management of FEW systems should be based on a thorough understanding of the FEW nexus to reduce the vulnerability of the coupled FEW systems to internal and external variability and enhance their resilience under complex conditions. It is increasingly crucial to develop and apply advanced theoretical/conceptual, empirical and computational approaches, models, techniques and tools to help understand the synergies and tradeoffs in the complicated FEW nexus systems and make scientifically-informed resource management decisions.
Call for Papers
This special issue of the Sustainable Cities and Society journal is devoted to the role of citizen in sustainable cities and society.
In order to achieve a sustainable performance of existing cities and districts, it is necessary to shift from a user that is simply a consumer (of energy, water, resources, etc.) to an informed user that interacts with the environment in different ways.
Some aspects have been widely recognized and studied in the last years, such as, for example, the importance of the users’ behavior in the energy use prediction and in achieving energy efficiency targets. However, to complete the paradigm of an informed citizen, many other aspects can be developed.
Enhancing the resiliency of our cities to extreme climate is necessary to maintain the prosperity of our communities. Community resilience encompasses both engineering and socio-economic systems that enable the functioning of a community at socially acceptable levels. These systems function interdependently, as damage to one system may affect the performance and functioning of others. When these systems are negatively impacted either individually or collectively due to specific stressors such as hurricanes, tornado, flood and other natural and human made hazards, the ability of the entire community to respond, cope and recover is compromised. In this regard, many researchers are working on the interdependency of the system, the characterization of the stressor, and the modeling of the complex interaction between the stressor and the system to assess system performance.
Traditionally, transportation scholars and professionals have approached sustainability by quantifying undesirable outcomes and searching for solutions to mitigate them. As a result, we now have a wide menu of proven or promising land-use, infrastructure, vehicle and fuel technology, and policy options for increasing the sustainability of our transportation systems. Yet, the plans and decisions that we continue to make look a lot like what we have been doing all along. For example, in what may be the largest evaluation of region land-use and transportation plans, Keith Bartholomew finds very little diversity in the range of plans created by 80 different planning agencies in the United States. The plans reviewed by Bartholomew only achieve marginal improvements in key sustainability indicators over business-as-usual scenarios. The median reduction in vehicle miles travelled and nitrous oxide emissions, the most frequently reported indicators, were only 2.3 and 2.1 percent, respectively. Even in California where the state’s Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008 mandates that metropolitan planning organizations create land-use and transportation plans that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, only modest progress has been made. The most aggressive plan is forecast to achieve no more than a 16% reduction in per capita emissions by the year 2035 over a year 2005 baseline. Total emissions will still increase due to population growth.
Special Issue Editor: Dr. Shobhakar Dhakal
The role of cities in global GHG mitigation cannot be underestimated. Cities contribute 71-76% of global energy related CO2 emissions and would account higher if emission are attributed to the consumption side. With 54% of global population already in urban areas and unprecedented urbanization continuing to take place, IPCC and other assessments have mentioned that next few decades are crucial for reorienting urbanization to low carbon pathways through infrastructure and urban design. Retrofitting or re-engineering existing cities are equally important with best practice technologies, systemic solution, infrastructure replacement, and other technological, behavioral and planning tools. Cities across the globe have been active and many local initiatives exist but, at the same time, the collective achievement of the city actions and their contribution to global emission reduction is yet not very evident. In this context, this special issue in Sustainable Cities and Societies Journal, titled “Low Carbon cities”, aims to provide a forum to assemble knowledge from related scholars to identify challenges and opportunities and to support towards low carbon city development.
Guest Editors: Ali Nazemi, Concordia University and Kaveh Madani, Imperial College London
You are invited to contribute a paper to the special issue “Sustainable Cities” in the journal of Sustainable Cities and Society.
This special issue will be devoted to the latest research articles and review papers related to all aspects of the Sustainable Cities including the following topics;
River rehabilitation has been an important research topic in fields including restoration ecology, urban ecology, hydrologic science, urban planning, resource management, and landscape architecture. Frameworks such as integrated water resources management, ecosystem services, and social-ecological systems offer a way to structure this knowledge from multiple disciplines and make it more salient for decision makers. However, there has been far less attention to the critical issue of linking this knowledge with implementation, particularly at the urban landscape scale where human-environment interactions frequently occur.