| 1. |
- Berbés-Blázquez, Marta, et al.
(författare)
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Assessing resilience, equity, and sustainability of future visions across two urban scales
- 2023
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - 1862-4065. ; 18:6, s. 2549-2566
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cities need to take swift action to deal with the impacts of extreme climate events. The co-production of positive visions offers the potential to not only imagine but also intervene in guiding change toward more desirable urban futures. While participatory visioning continues to be used as a tool for urban planning, there needs to be a way of comparing and evaluating future visions so that they can inform decision-making. Traditional tools for comparison tend to favor quantitative modeling, which is limited in its ability to capture nuances or normative elements of visions. In this paper, we offer a qualitative method to assess the resilience, equity, and sustainability of future urban visions and demonstrate its use by applying it to 11 visions from Phoenix, AZ. The visions were co-produced at two different governance scales: five visions were created at the village (or borough) scale, and six visions were created at the regional (or metropolitan) scale. Our analysis reveals different emphases in the mechanisms present in the visions to advance resilience, sustainability, and equity. In particular, we note that regional future visions align with a green sustainability agenda, whereas village visions focus on social issues and emphasize equity-driven approaches. The visions have implications for future trajectories, and the priorities that manifest at the two scales speak of the political nature of visioning and the need to explore how these processes may interact in complementary, synergistic, or antagonistic ways.
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| 2. |
- Chester, Mikhail V., et al.
(författare)
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Sensemaking for entangled urban social, ecological, and technological systems in the Anthropocene
- 2023
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Ingår i: npj Urban Sustainability. - 2661-8001. ; 3:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental complexity (i.e., requisite complexity), and iii) describe modes of SETS sensemaking for urban system structures and functions as basic tenets to build requisite complexity. SETS sensemaking is an undertaking to reflexively bring sustained adaptation, anticipatory futures, loose-fit design, and co-governance into organizational decision-making and to help reimagine institutional structures and processes as entangled SETS.
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| 3. |
- McPhearson, Timon, et al.
(författare)
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A social-ecological-technological systems framework for urban ecosystem services
- 2022
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Ingår i: One Earth. - : Elsevier BV. - 2590-3330 .- 2590-3322. ; 5:5, s. 505-518
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As rates of urbanization and climatic change soar, decision-makers are increasingly challenged to provide innovative solutions that simultaneously address climate change impacts and risks and inclusively ensure quality of life for urban residents. Cities have turned to nature-based solutions to help address these challenges. Nature-based solutions, through the provision of ecosystem services, can yield numerous benefits for people and address multiple challenges simultaneously. Yet, efforts to mainstream nature-based solutions are impaired by the complexity of the interacting social, ecological, and technological dimensions of urban systems. This complexity must be understood and managed to ensure ecosystem-service provisioning is effective, equitable, and resilient. Here, we provide a social-ecological-technological system (SETS) framework that builds on decades of urban ecosystem services research to better understand four core challenges associated with urban nature-based solutions: multi-functionality, systemic valuation, scale mismatch of ecosystem services, and inequity and injustice. The framework illustrates the importance of coordinating natural, technological, and socio-economic systems when designing, planning, and managing urban nature-based solutions to enable optimal social-ecological outcomes.
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| 4. |
- Berbés-Blázquez, Marta, et al.
(författare)
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Assessing Future Resilience, Equity, and Sustainability in Scenario Planning
- 2021
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Ingår i: Urban Book Series. - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 2365-757X .- 2365-7588. ; , s. 113-127
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the absence of strong international agreements, many municipal governments are leading efforts to build resilience to climate change in general and to extreme weather events in particular. However, it is notoriously difficult to guide and activate processes of change in complex adaptive systems such as cities. Participatory scenario planning with city professionals and members of civil society provides an opportunity to coproduce positive visions of the future. Yet, not all visions are created equal. In this chapter, we introduce the Resilience, Equity, and Sustainability Qualitative (RESQ) assessment tool that we have applied to compare positive scenario visions for cities in the USA and Latin America. We use the tool to examine the visions of the two desert cities in the Urban Resilience to Extreme Events Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN), which are Hermosillo (Mexico) and Phoenix (United States).
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| 5. |
- Metson, Genevieve, 1988-, et al.
(författare)
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Phosphorus in Phoenix : a budget and spatial representation of phosphorus in an urban ecosystem
- 2012
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Ingår i: Ecological Applications. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 1051-0761 .- 1939-5582. ; 22:2, s. 705-721
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As urban environments dominate the landscape, we need to examine how limiting nutrients such as phosphorus (P) cycle in these novel ecosystems. Sustainable management of P resources is necessary to ensure global food security and to minimize freshwater pollution. We used a spatially explicit budget to quantify the pools and fluxes of P in the Greater Phoenix Area in Arizona, USA, using the boundaries of the Central Arizonaï¿œPhoenix Long-Term Ecological Research site. Inputs were dominated by direct imports of food and fertilizer for local agriculture, while most outputs were small, including water, crops, and material destined for recycling. Internally, fluxes were dominated by transfers of food and feed from local agriculture and the recycling of human and animal excretion. Spatial correction of P dynamics across the city showed that human density and associated infrastructure, especially asphalt, dominated the distribution of P pools across the landscape. Phosphorus fluxes were dominated by agricultural production, with agricultural soils accumulating P. Human features (infrastructure, technology, and waste management decisions) and biophysical characteristics (soil properties, water fluxes, and storage) mediated P dynamics in Phoenix. P cycling was most notably affected by water management practices that conserve and recycle water, preventing the loss of waterborne P from the ecosystem. P is not intentionally managed, and as a result, changes in land use and demographics, particularly increased urbanization and declining agriculture, may lead to increased losses of P from this system. We suggest that city managers should minimize cross-boundary fluxes of P to the city. Reduced P fluxes may be accomplished through more efficient recycling of waste, therefore decreasing dependence on external nonrenewable P resources and minimizing aquatic pollution. Our spatial approach and consideration of both pools and fluxes across a heterogeneous urban ecosystem increases the utility of nutrient budgets for city managers. Our budget explicitly links processes that affect P cycling across space with the management of other resources (e.g., water). A holistic management strategy that deliberately couples the management of P and other resources should be a priority for cities in achieving urban sustainability.
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| 6. |
- Chang, Heejun, et al.
(författare)
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Assessment of urban flood vulnerability using the social-ecological-technological systems framework in six US cities
- 2021
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Ingår i: Sustainable cities and society. - : Elsevier BV. - 2210-6707. ; 68
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As urban populations continue to grow through the 21st century, more people are projected to be at risk of exposure to climate change-induced extreme events. To investigate the complexity of urban floods, this study applied an interlinked social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) vulnerability framework by developing an urban flood vulnerability index for six US cities. Indicators were selected to reflect and illustrate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to flooding for each of the three domains of SETS. We quantified 18 indicators and normalized them by the cities' 500-yr floodplain area at the census block group level. Clusters of flood vulnerable areas were identified differently by each SETS domain, and some areas were vulnerable to floods in more than one domain. Results are provided to support decision-making for reducing risks to flooding, by considering social, ecological, and technological vulnerability as well as hotspots where multiple sources of vulnerability coexist. The spatially explicit urban SETS flood vulnerability framework can be transferred to other regions facing challenging urban floods and other types of environmental hazards. Mapping SETS flood vulnerability helps to reveal intersections of complex SETS interactions and inform policy-making for building more resilient cities in the face of extreme events and climate change impacts.
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| 7. |
- Deyhle, Richard T, et al.
(författare)
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Maintenance of near normal bone mass and architecture in lethally irradiated female mice following adoptive transfer with as few as 750 purified hematopoietic stem cells
- 2019
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Ingår i: Radiation Research. - 0033-7587. ; 5, s. 413-427
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Total-body irradiation (TBI) followed by transfer of bone marrow cells from donors is routinely performed in immunology research and can be used to manipulate differentiation and/or function of bone cells. However, exposure to high-dose radiation can result in irreversible osteopenia, and transfer of heterogeneous cell populations can complicate interpretation of results. The goal of this research was to establish an approach for reconstituting bone marrow using small numbers of purified donor-derived hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) without negatively affecting bone metabolism. Gamma-irradiated (9 Gy) WBB6F1 mice were engrafted with bone marrow cells (5 × 106 cells) or purified HSCs (3,000 cells) obtained from GFP transgenic mice. In vivo analysis and in vitro differentiation assays performed two months later established that both methods were effective in reconstituting the hematopoietic compartment with donor-derived cells. We confirmed these findings by engrafting C57Bl/6 (B6) mice with bone marrow cells or purified HSCs from CD45.1 B6 congenic mice. We next performed adoptive transfer of purified HSCs (750 cells) into WBB6F1 and radiosensitive KitW/W-v mice and evaluated the skeleton two months later. Minimal differences were observed between controls and WBB6F1-engrafted mice that received fractionated doses of 2 × 5 Gy. Kitw/wv mice lost weight and became osteopenic after 2 × 5 Gy irradiations but these abnormalities were negligible after 5 Gy irradiation. Importantly, adoptive transfer of wild-type cells into Kitw/wv mice restored normal Kit expression in bone marrow. Together, these findings provide strong evidence for efficient engraftment with purified HSCs after lethal TBI with minimal collateral damage to bone. This approach will be useful for investigating mechanisms by which hematopoietic lineage cells regulate bone metabolism.
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