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Urban Ecological Security in the Era of Climate Change

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A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Science and Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 5586

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Prof. Dr. Wenzhi Cao

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Guest Editor

College of the Environment & Ecology, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361102, China
Interests: urban ecological security; river ecology; coastal biogeochemical processes; impacts of climate change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Lina Tang

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Guest Editor

Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China
Interests: urban ecological pattern; processes and influencing mechanisms; landscape ecology and ecological environment planning and management; ecological remote sensing and sustainable urban development

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As centers of human production, activity, and life, urban areas are one of the main driving forces of economic and social development. However, they are also zones that contribute emphatically to global climate change and disaster risk. At present, more than half of the world's population live in urban areas where carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are the dominant form of energy use (75%), with significant knock-on effects on the global biogeochemical cycle and climate change. At the same time, climate change has dramatically reinforced stresses on urban eco-environment systems and brought tremendous challenges to urban ecological security, governance systems, and sustainable development. Consequently, urban areas around the world have become actively engaged in responding to natural changes, implementing strategies to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. Urban areas must be comprehensively engineered to improve resilience, enhance adaptive capacity, and construct urban ecological security patterns. This not only involves new technical means, spatial planning, and control, but also involves social organization and governance, among many other aspects. The important topics of urban ecological security in the era of climate change are as follows: ecological security diagnosis or the assessment of urban areas and urban agglomerations; the simulation and prediction of ecological risk; early warning and emergency response technologies for ecological risk; the remediation and improvement of ecological service functions in climate-fragile areas; trade-offs and synergies of ecosystem services in urban areas and urban agglomerations; the resilience of ecological security patterns of urban areas and urban agglomerations; the improvement of climate change response mechanisms and governance capabilities. Thus, this Special Issue invites papers on the above topics.

Prof. Dr. Wenzhi Cao
Prof. Dr. Lina Tang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

urban forms
climate change
ecological security and patterns
resilience
adaptive capacity
ecosystem services
sustainability
ecological paradigm
risk assessment and early warning
nature-based solution
urban landscape
coastal zone
ecological remediation
modeling and scenario building
monitoring and assessment

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 7010 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Spatial Differentiation of PM_2.5 Concentration and Analysis of Atmospheric Health Patterns in the Xiamen-Zhangzhou-QuanZhou Urban Agglomeration

by Suiping Zeng, Jian Tian, Yuanzhen Song, Jian Zeng and Xiya Zhao

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(4), 3340; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043340 - 14 Feb 2023

Viewed by 1054

Abstract

Exploring the spatial differentiation of PM_2.5 concentrations in typical urban agglomerations and analyzing their atmospheric health patterns are necessary for building high-quality urban agglomerations. Taking the Xiamen-Zhangzhou-Quanzhou urban agglomeration as an example, and based on exploratory data analysis and mathematical statistics, we explore the PM_2.5 spatial distribution patterns and characteristics and use hierarchical analysis to construct an atmospheric health evaluation system consisting of exposure–response degree, regional vulnerability, and regional adaptation, and then identify the spatial differentiation characteristics and critical causes of the atmospheric health pattern. This study shows the following: (1) The average annual PM_2.5 value of the area in 2020 was 19.16 μg/m³, which was lower than China’s mean annual quality concentration limit, and the overall performance was clean. (2) The spatial distribution patterns of the components of the atmospheric health evaluation system are different, with the overall cleanliness benefit showing a “north-central-south depression, the rest of the region is mixed,” the regional vulnerability showing a coastal to inland decay, and the regional adaptability showing a “high north, low south, high east, low west” spatial divergence pattern. (3) The high-value area of the air health pattern of the area is an “F-shaped” spatial distribution; the low-value area shows a pattern of “north-middle-south” peaks standing side by side. The assessment of health patterns in the aforementioned areas can provide theoretical references for pollution prevention and control and the construction of healthy cities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Ecological Security in the Era of Climate Change)

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17 pages, 5011 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evaluating Spatial Identity Based on Climate Adaptation in Small Cities

by Tao Luo, Zijing Zhang, Xinchen Hong, Yanyun Wang and Xuewei Zhang

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(1), 713; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010713 - 30 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1160

Abstract

Urban spatial identity is declining in Chinese cities overall due to urbanization, which is attracting increasing attention from the government. Research gaps include systematically comparing urban identities based on causes and manifestations in small cities. We developed a framework for estimating spatial identity from the perspective of climate adaptation, which is based on the relationship between regional climate and spatial form. Five small cities were selected in China: Wu’an, Qingcheng, Jintang, Changxing, and Lianjiang. Our findings suggest that (1) typical indicators include impervious surface rate, green coverage rate, water surface rate, average story number, and total gross floor area, contributing to morphological characteristics influenced by climate drivers; (2) for the hot humid climate zones, the city with the highest level of spatial identity is in Jintang, followed by Lianjiang and Changxing; and for the cold climate zones, the level of spatial identity in Qingcheng was higher than in Wu’an. This can contribute to the understanding and methodology of spatial identity based on climate adaptation in small cities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Ecological Security in the Era of Climate Change)

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23 pages, 6630 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Assessment of Supply and Demand of Regional Flood Regulation Ecosystem Services and Zoning Management in Response to Flood Disasters: A Case Study of Fujian Delta

by Jian Tian, Suiping Zeng, Jian Zeng and Feiyang Jiang

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(1), 589; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010589 - 29 Dec 2022

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 1573

Abstract

Global climate change has led to flood disasters increasing in terms of frequency and damage caused, which seriously threatens urban and rural security. The flood regulation (FR) service function of the ecosystem plays an important role in mitigating flood disaster risk. Previous studies on flood regulation ecosystem services (FRES) are still lacking in a cross-scale assessment of supply and demand, refined simulation of regional complex hydrology, and application of spatial zoning management. Taking the Fujian Delta as an example, this study established a cross-scale research framework based on the social-ecosystem principle. The SWAT model was used to simulate the regional hydrological runoff and calculate the macro-scale supply of FRES. Taking patches of land as units, a flood risk assessment model was constructed to calculate the micro-scale demand for FRES for urban and rural society. Through a comparison of supply and demand across spatial scales, a zoning management scheme to deal with flood disaster risk was proposed. The results showed that: (1) The supply of FRES differed greatly among the sub-basins, and the sub-basins with low supply were mostly distributed in the lower reaches of Jiulong River and the coastal areas. (2) The demand for FRES was concentrated in high-density urban built-up areas. (3) By comparing the supply and demand of FRES in sub-basin units, 2153 km² ecological space was identified as the primary ecological protection area, and 914 km² cultivated land and bare land were identified as the primary ecological restoration area. (4) By comparing the supply and demand of FRES of land patch units, 65.42 km² of construction land was identified as the primary intervention area. This study provides a decision-making basis for regional flood disaster management from the perspective of FRES. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Ecological Security in the Era of Climate Change)

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22 pages, 6396 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Multi-Scenario Simulation to Predict Ecological Risk Posed by Urban Sprawl with Spontaneous Growth: A Case Study of Quanzhou

by Jiangfu Liao, Lina Tang and Guofan Shao

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(22), 15358; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192215358 - 21 Nov 2022

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1410

Abstract

The rapid expansion of different types of urban land continues to erode natural and semi-natural ecological space and causes irreversible ecological damage to rapidly industrialized and urbanized areas. This work considers Quanzhou, a typical industrial and trade city in southeastern China as the research area and uses a Markov chain integrated into the patch-generating land use simulation (PLUS) model to simulate the urban expansion of Quanzhou from 2005 to 2018. The PLUS model uses the random forest algorithm to determine the contribution of driving factors and simulate the organic and spontaneous growth process based on the seed generation mechanism of multi-class random patches. Next, leveraging the importance of ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity as indicators of evaluation endpoints, we explore the temporal and spatial evolution of ecological risks from 2018 to 2031 under the scenarios of business as usual (BAU), industrial priority, and urban transformation scenarios. The evaluation endpoints cover water conservation service, soil conservation service, biodiversity maintenance service, soil erosion sensitivity, riverside sensitivity, and soil fertility. The ecological risk studied in this work involves the way in which different types of construction land expansion can possibly affect the ecosystem. The ecological risk index is divided into five levels. The results show that during the calibration simulation period from 2005 to 2018 the overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient reached 91.77% and 0.878, respectively. When the percent-of-seeds (PoS) parameter of random patch seeds equals 0.0001, the figure of merit of the simulated urban construction land improves by 3.9% compared with the logistic-based cellular automata model (Logistic-CA) considering organic growth. When PoS = 0.02, the figure of merit of the simulated industrial and mining land is 6.5% higher than that of the Logistic-CA model. The spatial reconstruction of multiple types of construction land under different urban development goals shows significant spatial differentiation on the district and county scale. In the industrial-priority scenario, the area of industrial and mining land is increased by 20% compared with the BAU scenario, but the high-level risk area is 42.5% larger than in the BAU scenario. Comparing the spatial distribution of risks under the BAU scenario, the urban transition scenario is mainly manifested as the expansion of medium-level risk areas around Quanzhou Bay and the southern region. In the future, the study area should appropriately reduce the agglomeration scale of urban development and increase the policy efforts to guide the development of industrial land to the southeast. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Ecological Security in the Era of Climate Change)

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