Urban greening can potentially help mitigate heat-related mortality and flooding facing the >4 billion urban population worldwide. However, the geographical variation of the relative combined hydrological and thermal performance benefits of such interventions are unknown. Here we quantify globally, using a hydrological model, how climate-driven trade-offs exist between hydrological retention and cooling potential of urban greening such as green roofs and parks. Using a Budyko framework, we show that water retention generally increases with aridity in water-limited environments, while cooling potential favors energy-limited climates. Our models suggest that common urban greening strategies cannot yield high performance simultaneously for addressing both urban heat-island and urban flooding problems in most cities globally. Irrigation, if sustainable, may enhance cooling while maintaining retention performance in more arid locations. Increased precipitation variability with climate change may reduce performance of thinner green-infrastructure more quickly compared to greened areas with thicker soils and root systems. Our results provide a conceptual framework and first-order quantitative guide for urban development, renewal and policymaking.

Groundwater extraction is increasing rapidly in many areas of the world, causing serious impacts such as falling water tables, ground surface subsidence, water quality degradation, and reduction of stream baseflow on which many ecosystems depend. Methods for understanding and predicting the impacts of groundwater extraction generally lack detailed spatial and temporal knowledge of the subsurface hydrogeomechanical properties. This review provides a comprehensive understanding of Earth and atmospheric tides and their impact on subsurface pore pressure. First, we evaluate the global occurrence of Earth and atmospheric tides. Then, we illustrate their impact on the groundwater response and connect this with the theory of poroelasticity, which underpins quantitative analyses. Finally, we review methods that utilize these impacts to characterize groundwater systems and to quantify their hydrogeomechanical properties. We conclude by highlighting their potential as passive and low‐cost investigation techniques and by outlining the research and developments required to progress and make analyses readily available. Thus, hydrogeomechanical properties of subsurface systems could be obtained at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, adding additional value to commonly acquired groundwater and atmospheric pressure data.

Understanding and managing groundwater resources in drylands is a challenging task, but one that is globally important. The dominant process for dryland groundwater recharge is thought to be as focused, indirect recharge from ephemeral stream losses. However, there is a global paucity of data for understanding and quantifying this process and transferable techniques for quantifying groundwater recharge in such contexts are lacking. Here we develop a generalized conceptual model for understanding water table and groundwater head fluctuations due to recharge from episodic events within ephemeral streams. By accounting for the recession characteristics of a groundwater hydrograph, we present a simple but powerful new water table fluctuation approach to quantify focused, indirect recharge over both long term and event time scales. The technique is demonstrated using a new, and globally unparalleled, set of groundwater observations from an ephemeral stream catchment located in NSW, Australia. We find that, following episodic streamflow events down a predominantly dry channel system, groundwater head fluctuations are controlled by pressure redistribution operating at three time scales from vertical flow (days to weeks), transverse flow perpendicular to the stream (weeks to months), and longitudinal flow parallel to the stream (years to decades). In relative terms, indirect recharge decreases almost linearly away from the mountain front, both in discrete monitored events as well as in the long‐term average. In absolute terms, the estimated indirect recharge varies from 80 to 30 mm/a with the main uncertainty in these values stemming from uncertainty in the catchment‐scale hydraulic properties.