Floodplains are regularly inundated areas of land that provide ecosystem benefits for the entire catchment area, along with numerous benefits for communities making them ideal for human settlement. The management of floodplains involves an ongoing dilemma; how best to balance the need to protect urban settlements from significant flood events with the benefits that inundation brings to the environmental and cultural values of the floodplain. These flood events have been traditionally addressed using technical flood protection measures. However, nature‐based solutions (NbS), provide a potential alternative approach. In this research, we analyze 29 global case studies centered on river floodplain management to investigate the barriers and enablers that affect the implementation of NbS, including floodplain restoration, mangroves, riparian forest restoration, wetland green infrastructure, among other strategies. The aim of this paper is to gain insights into improving floodplain management through the assessment of barriers and enablers evident in these case studies. The barriers and enablers were divided into six categories: social, technical, financial, political, institutional and economic and further into several sub‐divided categories. Social and technical categories were the most commonly described barriers and enablers closely followed by the institutional category. The discussion is centered around four topics: understanding community and decision‐maker risk perceptions, increased focus on stakeholders, managing multiple conflicting objectives, and consideration of multiple spatial scales. Further research on the uptake of NbS needs to focus on addressing risk communication and modeling, managing trade‐offs, and demonstration of delayed benefits.This article is categorized under: Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness Science of Water > Water and Environmental Change

Cities have been recognized as important players in some of today’s most visible global agendas, from the Paris Agreement on climate to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This is a formalization of the global role of cities, on which we have little systematic evidence. The formal role of cities remains murky at best, when not unspecified or lumped into civil society. The review presented here, the first of its kind in both international and urban studies, explores the ways in which the United Nations has formally recognized cities in its key documentation, as represented by 32 key frameworks, treaties and statements underpinning the current Agenda 2030. It differentiates across three ‘functions’ ascribed to cities: as issues, as places and as actors. The results of this study highlight the pervasiveness of cities being referred to as actors in official United Nations documentation, over and above other functions. Further unpacking the idea of city agency and implications for cities, we demonstrate that talk of the meteoric ‘rise’ of cities might need to be undertaken more carefully with the better understanding of historical trends.

City diplomacy has a long history and has witnessed a clear sprawl over the last century. Successive “generations” of city diplomacy approaches have emerged over this period, with a heyday of networked urban governance in the last two decades. The covid-19 pandemic crisis presents a key opportunity to contemplate the direction of city diplomacy amid global systemic disruptions, raising questions about the effectiveness of differing diplomatic styles across cities but also the prospect of a new generational shift. This essay traces the history of generations in city diplomacy, examines prospects for novel ways of understanding city diplomacy, and contemplates how the pandemic’s impact heralds not the demise of internationalization in urban governance but an era in which city diplomacy is even more crucial amid fundamental limitations.

In the context of a changing urban environment and increasing demand due to population growth, alternative water sources must be explored in order to create future water security. Risk assessments play a pivotal role in the take-up of new and unfamiliar water projects, acting as a decision-making tool for business cases. Perceptions of risk ultimately drive risk assessment processes, therefore providing insight into understanding projects that proceed and those that do not. Yet there is limited information on the risk perceptions water professionals have of new and unfamiliar water projects. In this study, 77 water professionals were surveyed from across the Melbourne metropolitan water industry to examine risk perceptions over a range of different, unfamiliar water projects. The qualitative data was thematically analysed, resulting in a number of risk perception factors for each hypothetical project. Risk factors that recurred most frequently are those that relate to community backlash and to the reputation of the organisation. These social risk perceptions occurred more frequently than other more technical risks, such as operational risks and process-related risks. These results were at odds with the existing literature assessing risk perceptions of business-as-usual projects, which presented cost as the key risk attribute. This study sheds light on the perceived nature of new and unfamiliar processes in the water sector, providing an understanding that public perceptions do matter to experts involved in water infrastructure decision-making.

Cities are playing an increasingly prominent role on the global policy stage, and in the process have established moreformalised international engagements. However, there is an incomplete understanding about the types and levels of capacity needed for such engagement. This study offers an examination of the underpinnings of “city diplomacy”. It confirms that cities recognise the importance of city diplomacy but also lack necessary resources to fulfill the commitments they make to global agendas . The article calls for action on three fronts : more effective training, formalised multilateral engagement , and stronger city-level diplomatic capacity.