Applying Resilience Thinking to Select More Sustainable Urban Development Scenarios in Shiraz, Iran

Abstract

Rapid urbanization is among the most important causes of ecological degradation across di erent spatial scales ranging from global to regional and local. As protection of ecological health and resiliency has a profound e ect on human being and welfare, it is essential for planners to incorporate ecological considerations into landscape and urban planning in order to realize wiser management of the future changes in harmony with sustainable development goals. This research introduces an approach to combine imperviousness indicator with landscape metrics to provide quantitative information on the spatiotemporal dynamics of Shiraz region. Landsat images are used to map the land cover of Shiraz region in 1976, 1990, 2000, and 2005. Using landscape metrics, spatial composition and con guration of impervious surface have been quanti ed. The metrics indicated increase in the size and connectivity of impervious surfaces. Results reveal that the growth of urbanization has had tremendous e ects on the size and connectivity of natural landscapes, particularly agricultural areas and wetlands. Furthermore, two urban growth scenarios have been generated for the year 2021 using modeling and compared using the aforesaid indices. The results point out that smart growth scenario, in which the land is e ciently used, is ecologically a more resilient option.

The SDGs, Ecosystem Services and Cities: A Network Analysis of Current Research Innovation for Implementing Urban Sustainability

“…(Table 2). Sotoudeh and Parivar [89] argue that we should apply resilience thinking to select more-sustainable urban-development scenarios to protect various scales of urban areas from ecological degradation due to urbanisation. Isolated studies (various colours in Figure 4) covered broader SDG topics (rather than only ecosystem services or SDG 11) such as health issues [90][91][92], tourism [93], and well-being [94].…”

Ecosystem services dynamics towards SDGs in the Belt and Road Initiative cities

“…However, there are still many challenges faced by sustainable urbanization assessment, which include the obstacles of accessing adequate, standardized, and comparable data (Shao et al, 2021), the lacking of institutions to monitor SDGs (Klopp and Petretta, 2017), and the complexity of localizing indicators in different cities (Zhang et al, 2022). ESs-related studies in the SDGs knowledge base mainly discuss the spatiotemporal changes of ESs (Mao et al, 2018; Schröter et al, 2017) and the contributions of ESs to the SDGs (Dilekli and Cazcarro, 2019; Sotoudeh and Parivar, 2016; Wood et al, 2018). According to previous findings, the interactions (trade-offs/synergies) among ESs are complex, and the correlations are spatially heterogenic (Rodríguez et al, 2006).…”