Abstract
Demand for resources and changing structures of human settlements arising from population growth are impacting via the twin crises of anthropogenic climate change and declining human health. Informed by documentary research, this article explores how Urban Resilience Theory (URT) and Human-Nature Connection Theory (HNCT) can inform urban development that leverages urban green infrastructure (UGI) to mitigate and meditate these two crises. The findings of this article are that UGI can be the foundation for action to reduce the severity and impact of those crises and progress inclusive and sustainable community planning and urban development. In summary, the URT promotes improvement in policy and planning frameworks, risk reduction techniques, adaptation strategies, disaster recovery mechanisms, environmentally sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel energy, the building of social capital, and integration of ecologically sustainable UGI. Further, the HNCT advocates pro-environmental behaviors to increase the amount and accessibility of quality remnant and restored UGI to realize the human health benefits provided by nature, while simultaneously enhancing the ecological diversity and health of indigenous ecosystems. The synthesis of this article postulates that realizing the combined potential of URT and HNCT is essential to deliver healthy urban settlements that accommodate projected urban population growth towards the end of the 21st-century.
Highlights
Over the past two centuries, urbanization has changed the relationship that urban dwellers share with the surrounding environment [1,2]
This article highlights that the Urban Resilience Theory (URT) and the Human-Nature Connection Theory (HNCT) can both make multifaceted contributions to mitigating and mediating the drivers and impacts of the twin crises of climate change and declining health among urban dwellers
With respect to both theories, conserving, protecting, and restoring quality urban green infrastructure (UGI) is the foundation for action to reduce the severity and impact of those crises and for progressing inclusive and sustainable community planning and urban development that focuses beyond 2050
Summary
Over the past two centuries, urbanization has changed the relationship that urban dwellers share with the surrounding environment [1,2]. Urban centers are gripped by two crises, exacerbated by a cascade of factors related to the short term doubling of the global human population, rapid urbanization of humanity, unsustainable lifestyle choices, short-term economically focused development, and the resultant changes in the structure of human settlements [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Those twin crises are anthropogenic climate change (hereafter referred to as climate change) and declining human health in urbanized populations [11,12,13]. Informed by the reviews of Parker [14,15,16,17,18] and others [19,20] and the key research over the past decade delivered by Lovell and Taylor [5], Tzoulas et al [7], Mathey et al [8], Norton et al [9], Meerow, Land 2020, 9, 252; doi:10.3390/land9080252 www.mdpi.com/journal/land
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