As cities are facing environmental and societal challenges, including climate change, rapid urbanization, and the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars and policymakers have recognized the potential of small-scale urban green infrastructures (UGI), such as rain gardens and street trees, to support important ecosystem services (ES) during periods of crisis and change. While there has been considerable research on the design, planning, engineering, and ecology of small-scale UGI, the governance modes of such spaces to support ES and manage ecosystem disservices (EDS) have received significantly less research attention. In this article, we provide a systematic review to evaluate how different modes of governance support different ES in small-scale green infrastructure. We evaluated governance in six types of small-scale green infrastructure: small parks, community gardens, vacant lands, rain gardens, green roofs, and street trees. Our review examines the different characteristics of four new governance approaches, including adaptive, network, mosaic, and transformative to understand their bottom-up nature and applicability in governing ES/disservices of small-scale UGI. Each governance mode can be effective for managing the ES of certain small-scale UGI, given their associations with principles such as resilience thinking, connectivity, and active citizenship. Our synthesis highlights knowledge gaps at the intersection between governance arrangements and ES in small-scale UGI. We conclude with a call for further research on the environmental and contextual factors that moderate the linkages between governance modes and ES/EDS in different types of UGI.

Nature-based and energy transition strategies are amongst most considerable solutions that are gaining popularity in recent years, especially in global north. This review provides a new approach to link these apparently independent concepts to highlight the potentials of coupled systems. Exploring common boundary concepts such as energy infrastructure, natural capital, land sink, ecosystem services etc. in both energy and environmental geography fields can facilitate our understanding toward potential contributions of nature-based solutions and energy transition for efficiency and sustainability goals. The results of this review can help to further develop robust coupled systems to deal with urban societal and environmental challenges such as land and energy scarcity. This review presents a variety of theoretical foundations and the rationales behind nature-based solutions and energy transition including socio-technical transitions, socio-ecological-technological, land-energy transition, and circular economy scholarships. Finally, by proposing future research directions, the role of each boundary concept in coupled NbS-ET systems is shown.

The severity of flood impacts is influenced by social vulnerability, which stems from marginalization processes that depress a community’s ability to mitigate and recover from flood events. Understanding how social vulnerability operates in different flood contexts informs who is most susceptible to which types of impacts. This study examines the empirical relationship between social vulnerability and flood risk and how that relationship varies by element at risk and flood magnitude. Using inputs of social vulnerability indicators and flood risk to crops and buildings, we employed spatial clustering and spatial regression to determine which social vulnerability characteristics are most associated with economic risk. Regions with high crop risk are associated with more natural resource-based employment and housing tenure, while low-risk regions are less linguistically isolated. For buildings, high-risk regions have higher proportions of renters and lower proportions of racial minorities, while low-risk areas are associated with mobile homes and vacant housing. Overall, housing tenure and natural resource dependence were consistently correlated with building and crop risk. This study advances scientific knowledge by highlighting how specific social vulnerability dimensions relate to flood risks across sectors and geographies.

Flooding is increasing in urban areas around the world, leading to loss of life and property damage, and cities are using urban green spaces (UGS) for flood regulation. The spatial attributes of UGS have an important role in controlling and regulating urban flooding, and there is a need for a systematic map on how spatial factors of UGS, such as shape, size, location, or connectivity, impact flooding in urban areas. The objectives of this study are to analyze and synthesize published material to evaluate the impacts of the spatial dimensions of UGS on flood regulation and to identify knowledge gaps and future research directions. Pertinent literature was reviewed and synthesized using the systematic mapping method. The results of this study show that previous research on spatial configuration have examined how variables such as slope, DEM, green space coverage, and landscape shape index impact runoff reduction. Slope was found to be an important, but not determining factor in flood regulation. There is a need for further research on how the geographic context of urban regions, including climatic conditions and land use changes, impacts UGS functionality. Additionally, there is a need for further research on how the spatial configuration of UGS impacts flood vulnerability and intensity, two under-addressed yet important topics in urban flooding.

Urban community gardens are a type of green space presenting a diverse role in urban systems. They can also be beneficial for solving the matter of food insecurity by providing self-sufficiency and resilience in low-income communities and increasing the continuity of agricultural activities. Even though plenty of research has been conducted around community gardens, there is a noticeable research gap concerning case studies in different geographic contexts, especially in the Middle East. This paper in response to the said gap aims at mapping the spatial distribution of community gardens and their socio-economic attributes in Tehran, Iran. A methodology consisting of semi-structured interviews, qualitative and descriptive analysis along with tools such as ArcGIS was employed and secondary data were obtained from various sources such as the Tehran statistical yearbook of the year 2020. The results demonstrate that currently there are a total of 26 community gardens in Tehran and they run based on governmental funds and support with a strong educational motive backing them up. There is also an evident geographical distribution imbalance in terms of gardens placement with them mostly being present in the southern part of the city, while in the northern districts the idea of community gardens has almost been nonexistent. Only districts 22, 8, and 7 among northern districts in Tehran have community gardens. In the southern part, district 19 includes the majority of gardens having seven in total. In short, gardens are mainly placed in areas with lower average land prices, median household income, and higher education graduates.

Globally, floods are becoming more severe, lasting longer, and occurring more frequently because of changes in climate, rapid urbanization, and changing human demographics. Although traditional structural flood mitigation infrastructures (e.g., drainage systems, levees) are effective in urban areas, their functionalities in the face of extreme rainfall events and increased development largely depend on the capacity and location of such systems, making complementary solutions such as nature-based solutions (NBS) important. The concept of NBS within the context of flood mitigation has gained traction in the last decade; however, the success of NBS depends on their effectiveness and distribution over urban regions. This article seeks to examine the potential of NBS as a flood loss mitigation tool in one of the fastest-growing and flood-prone counties of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County, using Generalized Linear Model (GLR) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) techniques. The analysis integrates the National Risk Index dataset for river flooding, a 100-year flood zone layer from National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL) provided by FEMA, with land use and impervious surface percent data derived from National Land Cover Database (NLCD) for 2019 and socioeconomic data at the U.S. census tract level from the 2019 U.S. Census. This study’s findings partially contradict previous research by revealing an unexpected relationship between NBS quantity in floodplains and expected annual loss. Findings also suggest that small size and disconnected patches of NBS in floodplains in some dense urban areas effectively reduce total losses from flood events.