Volunteers play a key role in natural resource management: their commitment, time and labour constitute a major contribution towards managing environments in Australia and throughout the world. From the point of view of environmental managers, much interest has focused on defining tasks suitable to volunteers. However, we argue that an improved understanding of what motivates volunteers is required to sustain volunteer commitments to environmental management in the long term. This is particularly important given that multiple government programs rely heavily on volunteers in Australia, a phenomenon also noted in the UK, Canada, and the USA. Whilst there is considerable research on volunteering in other sectors (e.g. health), there has been relatively little attention paid to understanding environmental volunteering. Drawing on the literature from other sectors and environmental volunteering where available, we present a set of six broad motivations underpinning environmental volunteers and five different modes through which environmental volunteering is manifested. We developed and refined the sets of motivations and modes through a pilot study involving interviews with volunteers and their coordinators from environmental groups in Sydney and Bass Coast. The pilot study data emphasise the importance of promoting community education as a major focus of environmental volunteer groups and demonstrate concerns over the fine line between supporting and abusing volunteers, given their role in delivering environmental outcomes.

Urban populations are growing rapidly throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Cities are vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change because of their concentration of people and infrastructure, the physical (geographical, material, and structural) attributes of the built environment, and the ecological interdependence with the urban ecosystem. Australia is one of the most highly urbanized countries in the region and its already variable climate is set to become hotter and drier with climate change. Climate change in Australia is expected to increase morbidity and mortality from thermal stress, bacterial gastroenteritis, vector-borne disease, air pollution, flooding, and bushfires. The cost and availability of fresh water, food, and energy will also likely be affected. The more vulnerable urban populations, including the elderly, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and those with underlying chronic disease, will be most affected. Adaptation strategies need to address this underlying burden of disease and inequity as well as implement broad structural changes to building codes and urban design, and infrastructure capacity. In doing so, cities provide opportunities to realize “co-benefits” for health (eg, from increased levels of physical activity and improved air quality). With evidence that climate change is underway, the need for cities to be a focus in the development of climate adaptation strategies is becoming more urgent.

In many parts of the world, urban planning has a renewed focus on addressing the multiple challenges associated with population growth and climate change. Focused on local needs and priorities, these planning processes are raising tensions between more compact and dense urban form to reduce energy use and associated emissions and the provision of urban green infrastructure for ecosystem services and climate adaptation. In this study, we investigated the spatial distribution of green infrastructure at the neighbourhood scale in Sydney, Australia and examined how a mix of landscape types (pavement, bare soil/dry grass, green grass, and tree cover) affect temperature variation in three important locations for urban residents—around the home, in the roads and footpaths where people walk, and in parkland areas. Considering that residential and parkland areas contribute to the majority of green space in Sydney, it is important to understand how changes in landscape mix within these three neighbourhood areas will affect local temperature for urban residents. For residential houses, it was found that the percentage of tree canopy cover around the house had a significant negative relationship (p = 0.002) with surface temperatures of rooftops where greater tree cover led to lower rooftop temperatures. In streetscapes, both the percentage of tree cover (p < 0.0001) and the percentage of green grass (p < 0.0001) within the road segment had a significant negative relationship with the surface temperature of the road pavement. In the parks, the percentage of pavement (p < 0.0001) and the percentage of bare soil/dry grass (p < 0.0001) showed a significantly positive trend with land surface temperatures where greater land cover in the form of pavement and bare soil/dry grass led to higher temperatures. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of promoting or reducing certain landscape covers depending on the land use type in order to maximise the cooling potential of green infrastructure.

Green infrastructure (GI) is a vital asset for sustainable cities, but an interdisciplinary approach must be taken if multifunctional and socially acceptable GI is to be developed. Here, we present the results of a workshop process to connect researchers and practitioners across academia, industry, and government and to enable a multidisciplinary group of participants to coalesce on a set of cross-cutting issues and prioritise a research agenda to address and advance GI research and uptake in Australia. We found that many of the challenges were ubiquitous across regions and scales, but research in a few key priority areas could advance GI across multiple cities. The key research areas were: Attitudes & Perceptions of GI; Increasing Biodiversity through GI; Optimising Spatial Configuration and Composition for Multiple Benefits; Economic Valuation of GI; Metrics, Models and Tools for Benchmarking Assessments; and Turning Research into Policy and Implementation. Although participants saw that there were many synergies across the research topics, there were challenges of translating the science for decision making and of establishing long-term institutional collaborations. However, urgency for sound evidence to support policy development and planning will require an interdisciplinary process to be maintained so that clear communication can be established across sectors.