Green infrastructure (GI) has been identified as a promising approach to help cities adapt to climate change through the provision of multiple ecosystem services. However, GI contributions to urban resilience will not be realized until it is more fully mainstreamed in the built environment and design professions. Here, we interrogate five key challenges for the effective implementation of GI: (1) design standards; (2) regulatory pathways; (3) socioeconomic considerations; (4) financeability; and (5) innovation. Methods include a literature review, case studies, and interviews with resilience managers. We propose a people-centred and context-dependent approach to advance effective implementation of GI in urban planning. We highlight two underlying currents that run across all of the challenges-(1) the role of political will as a precondition for tackling all challenges holistically; and (2) the role of stakeholder engagement in achieving public support, harnessing funding, and maintaining and monitoring GI in the long term. Highlights: The effective implementation of GI is context-specific and should adhere to the basic principles of appropriate technology. Continuous community engagement is needed to ensure the inclusivity and multi-functionality of GI. Challenges to successful GI are intersectional and therefore cannot be addressed singly in isolation.

After briefly reviewing key resilience engineering perspectives and summarising some green infrastructure (GI) tools, we present the contributions that GI can make to enhancing urban resilience and maintaining critical system functionality across complex integrated social-ecological and technical systems. We then examine five key challenges for the effective implementation of GI that include (1) standards; (2) regulation; (3) socioeconomic factors; (4) financeability; and (5) innovation. We highlight ways in which these challenges are being dealt with around the world, particularly through the use of approaches that are both context appropriate and socially inclusive. Although progress surmounting these challenges has been made, more needs to be done to ensure that GI approaches are inclusive and appropriate and feature equally alongside more traditional 'grey' infrastructure in the future of urban resilience planning. This research was undertaken for the Resilience Shift initiative to shift the approach to resilience in practice for critical infrastructure sectors. The programme aims to help practitioners involved in critical infrastructure to make decisions differently, contributing to a safer and better world.

Integration of relatively new policy tasks like climate adaptation into established higher-level policy field is insufficiently understood in the academic literature. This paper proposes a framework to evaluate the integration of climate adaptation into the sectoral policy-making of the European Commission, particularly following the publication of the EU Adaptation Strategy (in 2013). The paper uses a framework of micro, meso and macro-level institutional behaviour drawing strongly on new institutionalism perspectives to identify and explain factors enabling and hindering policy integration. It focuses on integration in the coastal and marine policy sector, which is expected to be particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts, and draws from data collected through systemic document review and interviews with key informants. The findings show that integration of climate adaptation is still at an early stage. The integration process appears to be largely dependent on institutional dynamics at the EU-level combined with how member states and wider sectoral stakeholders engage with adaptation concerns. In particular ambivalence of some member states and a lack of urgency among sectoral stakeholders has hampered the integration of adaptation goals.

Tackling diffuse pollution from agriculture is a key challenge for governments seeking to implement the European Union’s Water Framework Directive (WFD). In the research literature, how best to integrate and align effective measures for tackling diffuse pollution, within the context of the EU’s multilevel governance structure, remains an open question. This paper focuses on the first and second implementation cycles of the WFD to explore how national governance arrangements either facilitated or hindered the adoption of effective policies, especially with regards to the delivery of agricultural and water policies on the ground. It draws on data collected through systematic document analysis and interviews with key experts, policymakers and interest groups, and presents a comparative analysis of two case studies: England and Scotland. The case studies show that Scotland’s joined-up governance structure, which enabled policymakers and interest groups to work together and to build trust and cooperation, facilitated the adoption of stricter measures for tackling diffuse pollution. In contrast, in England institutional fragmentation prevented a meaningful engagement of all parties and acted as a barrier. The analysis unpacks the design of policy mixes and the conditions that allow national governments to pursue more holistic and integrated governance approaches to overcome opposition from interest groups and gain their support.

Countries around the world introduced strict restrictions on movement and activities known as 'lockdowns' to restrict the spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from the end of 2019. A sudden improvement in air quality was observed globally as a result of these lockdowns. To provide insight into the changes in air pollution levels in response to the COVID-19 restrictions we have compared surface air quality data in Delhi during four phases of lockdown and the first phase of the restriction easing period ( 25March to 30 June 2020) with data from a baseline period (2018)(2019). Simultaneously, short-term exposure of PM 2.5 and O 3 attributed premature mortality were calculated to understand the health benefit of the change in air quality. Ground-level observations in Delhi showed that concentrations of PM 10 , PM 2.5 and NO 2 dropped substantially in 2020 during the overall study period compared with the same period in previous years, with average reductions of ~49%, ~39%, and ~39%, respectively. An overall lower reduction in O 3 of ~19% was observed for Delhi. A slight increase in O 3 was found in Delhi's industrial and traffic regions. The highest peak of the diurnal variation decreased substantially for all the pollutants at every phase. The decrease in PM 2.5 and O 3 concentrations in 2020, R I P T prevented 904 total premature deaths, a 60% improvement when compared to the figures for 2018-2019. The restrictions on human activities during the lockdown have reduced anthropogenic emissions and subsequently improved air quality and human health in one of the most polluted cities in the world.