Problem, research strategy, and findings: Land use planning is key to mitigating natural hazards and the effects of climate change. Communities adopt multiple plans that directly and indirectly address hazard mitigation; the integration of local plans can significantly affect future community vulnerability to hazards. We develop a resilience scorecard to assess the degree to which the network of local plans targets areas most prone to hazards and then evaluate the coordination of local plans and test it in Washington (NC), a community vulnerable to coastal floods and projected sea-level rise. We find that local plans are not fully consistent and do not always address the areas in a community most vulnerable to floods or sea level risks; moreover, some plans actually increase physical and social vulnerability to hazards. While these results indicate the validity of a resiliency scorecard, we were forced to use a narrow range of vulnerability indicators; better data would improve the process. Takeaway for practice: Planners can assume a crucial role in improving planning for hazards by using the scorecard to identify conflicts among local plans, assessing whether local plans target areas most vulnerable to specific hazards. Planners can inform the public and decision makers about missed opportunities to improve local hazard mitigation planning. To support such important efforts, the U.S. Federal -Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies should consider developing additional databases that are widely applicable and available.

Vacant land is a significant issue in virtually every country across the globe. This study presents a current inventory of vacant land and structural abandonment in the urban United States. Using survey data, it analyses vacant land trends by region and city type. Nationally, an average 16.7% of large US cities’ land area is considered vacant, with approximately 4% of city addresses unoccupied. The ratio of vacant land to city size has increased by 1.3 percentage points since 1998 but decreased by 3 percentage points since 1963. Regional variations exist in both the amount and kind of vacant land, suggesting that any ameliorative actions should be designed to fit specific conditions. Cities also reported that most vacant parcels are small, odd shaped, and disconnected, making them difficult to regenerate. Disinvestment, suburbanization and annexation are the primary causes of increases in vacant land supply while growing local economies, population in-migration, and city policies tend to help reduce the amount of vacant land.

Due to the increase in future uncertainty caused by rapid environmental, societal, and technological change, exploring multiple scenarios has become increasingly important in urban planning. Land Change Modeling (LCM) enables planners to have the ability to mold uncertain future land changes into more determined conditions via scenarios. This paper reviews the literature on urban LCM and identifies driving factors, scenario themes/types, and topics. The results show that: (1) in total, 113 driving factors have been used in previous LCM studies including natural, built environment, and socio-economic factors, and this number ranges from three to twenty-one variables per model; (2) typical scenario themes include “environmental protection” and “compact development”; and (3) LCM topics are primarily growth prediction and prediction tools, and the rest are growth-related impact studies. The nature and number of driving factors vary across models and sites, and drivers are heavily determined by both urban context and theoretical framework.

The aim of this study was to identify the major variables identified as important for considering the stabilization of slope revegetation based on hydroseeding applications and evaluate weights of each variable using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with both environmental experts and civil engineers. Twenty-five variables were selected by the experts’ survey from a total of 65 from the existing literature, with each variable considered as an important factor for slope stabilization in South Korea. The final results from the AHP method showed that variables associated with the driving force of water resources showed higher values in all expert groups such as rain intensity, seepage water and drainage condition. Other important variables were related to plant growth such as vegetation community, vegetation coverage and quality of soil ameliorant produced in an artificial factory such as tensile strength, permeability coefficient, soil texture and organic matter. The five highest-ranked variables that satisfied both environmental experts and civil engineers were rain intensity, seepage water, slope angle, drainage condition and ground layer. The findings of this research could be helpful for developing a more accurate rating system to evaluate the stability of slope revegetation.

Many cities worldwide are using re-greening strategies to help reverse urbanization patterns that aggravate environmental issues. Green infrastructure (GI) has become a significant and effective strategy to address environmental problems. To better understand GI, this study uses CiteSpace to analyze 5420 published papers in the field of GI on the Web of Science database from 1990–2020. This bibliometric analysis will help new scholars and researchers to better understand the current status and trends in GI research, as well as identify further research needed in the field. This study evaluated research on GI trends according to publication amounts, keywords, journals, disciplines, countries, institutions, and authors. Results show that, first, GI research has experienced rapid growth since 2014. Second, GI, ecosystem services, and city are the top three keywords related to GI research, with green roof as the keyword with the strongest linkage. Third, Sustainability, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, and Landscape and Urban Planning are the top three journals publishing GI research. Fourth, the top three disciplines researching GI are environmental science, engineering, and science and technology. Fifth, the USA is the top ranked country in terms of the number of published GI-related papers (1514 papers), followed by China (730 papers) and England (546 papers). Sixth, the US Environmental Protection Agency (84 papers) is the top institution in terms of publications, followed by the Chinese Academy of Science (83 papers) and the Swedish University of Agriculture (66 papers). Finally, D. Haase has the most published articles (29 papers), followed by S. Pauleit (28 papers) and P. Angelstam (26 papers). These findings indicate that GI has developed significantly in the last 30 years, with a high probability for increased growth in the future.