The impact of climate change in recent years has caused considerable risks to both urban and rural systems. How to mitigate the damage caused by extreme weather events has attracted much attention from countries in recent years. However, most of the previous studies on resilience focused on either urban areas or rural areas, and failed to clearly identify the difference between urban and rural resilience. In fact, the exploration of the difference between the resilience characteristics of cities and villages under climate change can help to improve the planning strategy and the allocation of resources. In this study, the indicators of resilience were firstly built through a literature review, and then a Principal Component Analysis was conducted to construct an evaluation system involving indicators such as “greenland resilience”, “community age structure resilience”, “traditional knowledge resilience”, “infrastructure resilience” and “residents economic independence resilience”. Then the analysis of Local Indicators of Spatial Association showed some resilience abilities are concentrated in either urban or rural. Binary logistic regression was performed, and the results showed urban areas have more prominent abilities in infrastructure resilience (the coefficient value is 1.339), community age structure resilience (0.694), and greenland resilience (0.3), while rural areas are more prominent in terms of the residents economic independence resilience (−0.398) and traditional knowledge resilience (−0.422). It can be seen that urban areas rely more on the resilience of the socio-economic structure, while rural areas are more dependent on their own knowledge and economic independence. This result can be used as a reference for developing strategies to improve urban and rural resilience.

The compact city is becoming a prevailing paradigm in the world to control urban sprawl and achieve a pattern of sustainable urban development. However, discussions of the area's overcrowded neighborhoods, its health problems, and the destruction of its green areas have inspired self-examination with respect to the compact city paradigm. High population density attracts even more residents and frequently renders the existing urban green space (UGS) insufficient for use as part of a living environment. Due to the unique benefits that these qualities confer, UGS allocation is now considered a significant contributing factor to urban livability. In addition, the UGS allocation may be different due to the presence of many spatial non-stationarity processes. Therefore, this study employs geographically-weighted regression (GWR) to explore the unique and spatially-explicit relationships between the degree of urban compaction and UGS within the Taipei metropolitan area. Maps summarizing the GWR results demonstrate that there is significantly insufficient UGS allocation in the central area, which consists mainly of Taipei City. Townships with higher parameters contain UGS levels that better meet the needs of their residents. Overall, the exploration of conceptualizing spatial heterogeneity of relationships between the degree of urban compaction and UGS can provide insightful analyses for decision-making on allocating UGS.

Due to the many large earthquakes that have occurred in recent years, the role of seismic risk reduction in building resilient cities has become a matter of concern. The serious disaster damage brought by seismic hazards causes the adoption of migration policies such as building control in the preparedness phase. However, the restricted budget of governments resulting from the global state of economic distress generates a prioritization problem. A decision support framework could be helpful for governments to systematically integrate the complex information when implementing disaster risk reduction policies toward sustainable development. The purpose of this study was to construct an analytical framework based on Geographic Information System (GIS) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for addressing the prioritization problem by calculating policy efficiency. The spatial DEA-based framework combines indices calculation, spatial database construction, and DEA. Taiwan is an island located in the Circum-Pacific Belt, and has paid long-term attention to adopting policies for earthquake disaster prevention. A policy of earthquake-oriented urban renewal combining enhanced building capacity and city resilience has recently been implemented. A case study of the Yongkang district of the Tainan Metropolis in Taiwan was conducted in this study. The results show an operable framework and propose a suggestion for planning efficient policy priorities in each decision-making unit. In sum, the analytical framework proposed in this study could be a component of a decision support system for governments to adopt disaster risk reduction policies in the process of policy-making and implementation.

Earthquakes are widely recognized as unpredictable and infrequent disasters that result in serious impacts on human settlements. Land use planning is one non-structural measure used to eliminate disaster risk by steering future development away from the existing built environment and enforcing particular structural engineering measures according to the disaster risk. However, arguments have arisen about applying land use planning to earthquake risk areas, as this serves as a type of disaster risk information disclosure that might impact the willingness to develop land or property value. Therefore, this study uses the spatial autocorrelation coefficient to examine the impact of land use planning on both land use and property transactions in the Chelungpu fault zone area (15 m from each side of the fault line) in Taiwan. The overall impacts with and without zoning regulation in the fault zone area are explored. The results demonstrate that parcels that changed to building use in the earlier time period (1995–2008) are located distant from those maintaining the same building use, whereas, later, building use (2008–2014) is located on or nearby the fault zone area. In addition, the most recently constructed buildings are located in or close to the fault zone area and have a relatively higher property price. The legal zoning regulation along the fault zone for building use requires lower height and less intensive building, which might help mitigate the potential impact of future earthquakes.

At present, nearly half of the population of China live in water-deficient areas where water needs to be transferred from surrounding or remote water sources to meet local water demands. Although the water transfer project has alleviated the demands for water in the water-deficient areas, and brought water-supply income to water source regions, it has also posed some cross-regional negative impacts, including the changes in the original ecology within the water source, the impacts on the downstream water demands, and the risk of biological invasion in the distant water receiving areas. Therefore, it can be seen that the impact of water transfer is complicated and will be manifested in various aspects. The Middle Route of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP-MR), as the world’s largest cross-watershed water transfer project, exerts particularly important effects on regional sustainable development; however, it also produces complex interactions within the ecological environment itself, downstream and in the distant water receiving cities. Thus, this work attempts to apply a metacoupling analysis framework of water transfer to explore the ecological interaction of water transfer in SNWTP-MR on each system. The metacoupling framework can be divided into intracoupling, pericoupling and telecoupling. This study focuses on the analysis of the causes and effects of the intracoupling, pericoupling and telecoupling of SNWTP-MR from the perspective of ecological values and ecological risks. We found that the coupling of water transfer brings about 23 billion yuan of ecological service value to the water source annually, but also increases the internal ecological risk index by 9.31%, through the calculation of changes in land use; secondly, the power generation benefit significantly increases, and the flood control standards have shifted from once-in-20 years to once-in-a-century. However, the ecological risks are also significant, such as poor water quality, eutrophication of water resources, competition for water between industry and agriculture, deterioration of waterway shipping, and threats to biodiversity, etc. Considering only water supply, the population carrying capacity of the water resource in distant water receiving cities is increased by 16.42 million people, which enhances the value of water resources and creates a cross-regional green ecological landscape belt. Nevertheless, the biological invasion and water pollution have greatly affected the safety of water supply. It can be seen that the cross-regional water transfer does not always damage the interests of the sending system and the spillover system while benefiting the receiving system; its impacts are complex and variable. Through this paper, it is hoped to provide a reference for the analysis of the ecological compensation, resource development and allocation in SNWTP-MR by revealing the metacoupling relationship of SNWTP-MR. This paper will provide new ideas for researching the metacoupling relationship, thereby offering valuable reference for the study of the interaction generated by large-scale water transfer.