Climate change is impacting the ecological, social and technological aspects of urban gardens. Gardens experience threats (e.g., water scarcity) but are also responding through adaptation strategies (e.g., selecting drought-resilient plants). A synthetic overview of how urban gardens are affected by climate change and responding to climate change is unclear. Here, we systematically reviewed articles and book chapters published in the last two decades (2000–2022) to illustrate the relationship between climate change and urban gardening. From 72 documents analyzed with Nvivo Software, we found that there has been an increase in academic publications. Universities from the US (14) and Germany (9) universities are the dominant producers. Evidence shows that climate change can have negative impacts on cities, people and urban food. Suggestions on how to build the adaptation capacity of urban gardens include collecting rainwater, changing plant selection, changing planting times, applying vegetative cover on the soil and other practices. For cities, community and allotment gardens are helpful for adaptation, mitigation and resilience. This includes the capacity to regulate the microclimate, to reduce urban heat island effects and to buffer urban floods, the power to capture carbon, the ability to create social networks and other socio-environmental benefits for urban climate planning.

The French Way of Santiago (“El Camino de Santiago Francés” in Spanish) is the most traveled route by pilgrims and tourists who make the Camino de Santiago to Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain). On its way, more than half of the route in Spanish territory belongs to the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León, crossing the provinces of Burgos, Palencia and León. For the characteristic climate of this area, various modifications are projected as a consequence of climate change, according to the Guide to Regionalized Climate Change Scenarios for Spain based on the results of the IPCC-AR5 (2017) and the Climate Change Scenarios Viewer developed in the PNACC framework based on the results of the IPCC-AR5 (2017), among which the increase in maximum and minimum temperatures, the increase in the duration of heat waves, the reduction of rainfall, the reduction of the numbers of rainy days and the increase in precipitation in 24-hour periods. These variations have the potential to cause alterations on the “French Way of Santiago” or “Camino de Santiago Frances” in Castilla y León, which are valuable to know in order to anticipate such scenarios and favor the adoption of adaptation and resilience measures. Considering the variety of possible repercussions, this article particularly analyzes the seasonality of the visits, the health of the pilgrims, the services of the cities and towns and the effects on the cultural heritage.

Due to the need to develop more agroforestry systems, the Moringa oleifera, Olea Europea, Glycine max, Brassica napus, Helianthus annuus, and Jatropha curcas are identified as unconventional species for their expansion under these systems in Colombia. With the Colombian Environmental Information System (SIAC) database, zoning was carried out according to the agroclimatic species requirements and optimal coverage for their production. As a result, a total area of 212,977.2 km² was identified, mainly including the departments of Casanare, Arauca, Vichada, Guajira, Córdoba, Meta, Magdalena, Cesar, Tolima, and Cundinamarca. The species and associations species with the most options for productive expansion are Moringa (75,758 km²), Moringa, Jatropha, and Sunflower (42,515.1 km²), Moringa and Jatropha (37,180.4 km²), Jatropha (20,840 km²), Jatropha and Sunflower (17,692.1 km²), Olive (7332.1 km²), and Soybean (3586.3 km²). Of the potential agroforestry areas to their establishment, 36% correspond to herbaceous and/or shrubby vegetation, 34% to grasses, and 22% to heterogeneous agricultural areas. This research is the first step to representing the agronomic versatility of these promising species and their potential contribution to the diversification of the agri-food and agroforestry sectors.

The renaissance in urban agriculture is driven by its contributions to fostering more sustainable, healthy, and renaturalized cities. While urban gardens are usually designed to improve food security or serve social purposes, they also offer additional benefits. The aim of this research is to study the urban allotment gardens in Valladolid, Spain, highlighting their capacity to support low-income populations and their potential contribution to urban cooling. As a result of research in twelve plots across four gardens, we found that crop selection in Valladolid aligns with broader urban gardening trends in the Global North, with production adapted to limited plot space and varying significantly by season. In addition, we observed that urban allotment gardens provide more stable and cooler temperatures compared to urban gray spaces, although not as significantly as urban parks. The cooling effect was most pronounced during the summer, a season with the highest number of crops and the warmest temperatures. The study identified that greater crop cover above soil had a more significant cooling effect at the plot level. Surprisingly, crop abundance and crop diversity showed a weak correlation with cooling benefits. As a complement, survey questionnaires conducted with gardeners revealed their awareness of climate change and its perceived direct threat to their crops, health, and city. The future concerns of gardeners regarding the availability of water for both crop growth and the development of urban allotment gardens are emphasized. The findings provide results on self-produced food, urban cooling, and the opinion of gardeners, underscoring the multifunctional contributions of urban gardens to cities.

Urban green spaces improve quality of life by mitigating urban temperatures. However, there are challenges in obtaining urban data to analyze and understand their influence. With the aim of developing innovative methodologies for this type of research, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) were developed to predict daily and hourly temperatures in urban green spaces from sensors placed in situ for 41 days. The study areas were four urban allotment gardens (with dynamic and productive vegetation) and a forested urban park in the city of Valladolid, Spain. ANNs were built and evaluated from various combinations of inputs (X), hidden neurons (Y), and outputs (Z) under the practical rule of “making networks simple, to obtain better results”. Seven ANNs architectures were tested: 7-Y-5 (Y = 6, 7, …, 14), 6-Y-5 (Y = 6, 7, …, 14), 7-Y-1 (Y = 2, 3, …, 8), 6-Y-1 (Y = 2, 3, …, 8), 4-Y-1 (Y = 1, 2, …, 7), 3-Y-1 (Y = 1, 2, …, 7), and 2-Y-1 (Y = 2, 3, …, 8). The best-performing model was the 6-Y-1 ANN architecture with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.42 °C for the urban garden called Valle de Arán. The results demonstrated that from shorter data points obtained in situ, ANNs predictions achieve acceptable results and reflect the usefulness of the methodology. These predictions were more accurate in urban gardens than in urban parks, where the type of existing vegetation can be a decisive factor. This study can contribute to the development of a sustainable and smart city, and has the potential to be replicated in cities where the influence of urban green spaces on urban temperatures is studied with traditional methodologies.

The emblematic French Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago Francés) crosses towns, cities, and Spanish regions to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain), However, where is The French Way of Saint James going with respect to the urban sustainability of its host cities? As each city is unique and urban sustainability favors the revitalization and transition of urban areas, to know where to go, it is first necessary to establish a diagnosis that makes the different urban situations visible. In this article, the behavior of urban sustainability is analyzed in the six host cities of The French Way of Saint James in the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León, a region characterized by its link with the rural environment and its current depopulation problems. The data and indicators used are officially provided by the Spanish Urban Agenda, which, through the normalization of its values, are able to territorialize the SDGs at the local level and reflect the realities of the cities of Burgos, Astorga, Cacabelos, León, Ponferrada, and Valverde de la Virgen. The results make it possible to diagnose and compare these host cities, identifying weaknesses, skills, and opportunities that favor the promotion of action plans, local or joint (favored by The French Way of Saint James), in the multiple aspects of sustainability. In addition, they show that Valverde de la Virgen is the city with the best performance in terms of urban sustainability.