Considering the current emerging demographic, urbanization and climatic trends, integrating sustainability and resilience principles into urban development becomes a key priority for decision-makers worldwide. Local and national governments, project developers and other urban stakeholders dealing with the complexities of urban development need projects with clear structure and outcomes in order to inform decision-making and ensure sources of financing. The need for developing an integrated assessment methodology that would capture and quantify multiple urban sustainability and resilience benefits of projects in one common framework and eventually lead to verifiable sustainability and resilience outcomes is immense and challenging at the same time. The main objective of this paper is to present the development of a methodological approach that aims to integrate sustainability and resilience benefits, derived from the implementation of green growth urban projects, into a unified framework of criteria addressing environmental, social, economic and institutional perspectives. The proposed sustainability and resilience benefits assessment (SRBA) methodology is a combination of top down and bottom up approaches, including GIS-based scenario building. The different types of sustainability and resilience benefits of urban green growth projects are also identified at different levels (i.e., individual, neighborhood, city and global). Moreover, the proposed methodology creates scenarios that can be illustrated by a map-based approach to enable a better illustration and visualization of benefits. It demonstrates how a map-based approach can assess not only the extent of sustainability and resilience benefits accrued (how much is benefitted), but also their spatial distribution (who is benefitted). The main methodological challenges and issues on developing an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment are identified and discussed.

A city is a place where many initiatives, people, and social and urban challenges meet. This article brings together the cumulative knowledge of eight researchers who have been studying community-based initiatives (CBIs) via case studies in various countries. In some countries, citizens were not satisfied with government-provided services, or services were lacking. Governments in other countries faced budget cuts to their public services, which led to a strong call for citizens to take matters into their own hands. There is a lack of research investigating the performance of CBIs and explaining their success and failure. The authors systematically analyze their recent case studies through qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and try to explain under which conditions CBIs lead to high performance. One of the key findings of this analysis is that proximate conditions related to the CBIs—strong organizational capacity, democratic structure, and leadership—are important for high performance. However, these conditions are not sufficient on their own. Community-based initiatives need a conductive environment to achieve high performance; in our cases, government support and a heterogeneous community or a supportive government attitude was key.

Climate change challenges necessitate innovative, effective and sustainable mitigation measures to enhance ecosystem resilience. This study presents the development and application of a participatory, and cross-sectoral multi-criteria assessment (MCA) decision-support tool designed to prioritize Nature-based Solutions (NBS) and Bioeconomy Solutions (BES) based on Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) nexus and selected impact (Social, Economic, Climate change, Institutional) criteria. The methodology and tool are adaptable in different contexts and can address several climate change, sustainability, and circularity challenges. The participatory MCA methodology was applied and validated during an all-day workshop on Tinos, a Greek island on the Aegean Sea. Local challenges were addressed and examined within the framework of two distinct sites. Workshop results identified habitat loss and biodiversity decline as the island’s primary challenges, with Conservation Agriculture and Agroforestry emerging as the top-rated solutions, scoring 78/100 and 71/100, respectively. Although stakeholders prioritized different interventions for each site, the selected solutions consistently aimed to address these environmental issues. This research study contributes to advancing understanding and practice in the field of sustainable resource management within the WEFE nexus, while underscoring the importance of participatory approaches in developing effective and context-specific sustainability strategies.