Identifying hotspots and management of critical ecosystem services in rapidly urbanizing Yangtze River Delta Region, China

Rapid urbanization has altered many ecosystems, causing a decline in many ecosystem services, generating serious ecological crisis. To cope with these challenges, we presented a comprehensive framework comprising five core steps for identifying and managing hotspots of critical ecosystem services in a rapid urbanizing region. This framework was applied in the case study of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) Region. The study showed that there was large spatial heterogeneity in the hotspots of ecosystem services in the region, hotspots of supporting services and regulating services aggregately distributing in the southwest mountainous areas while hotspots of provisioning services mainly in the northeast plain, and hotspots of cultural services widespread in the waterbodies and southwest mountainous areas. The regionalization of the critical ecosystem services was made through the hotspot analysis. This study provided valuable information for environmental planning and management in a rapid urbanizing region and helped improve China's ecological redlines policy at regional scale

Mapping the Land-Use Suitability for Urban Sprawl Using Remote Sensing and GIS Under Different Scenarios

Urbanization is one of the important issues in fast developing countries, such as China, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa. Therefore, sustainable urbanization strategies come into question while designing the cities. In this point, land-use suitability mapping for urban areas is of importance. Spatial information sciences, such as geographical information systems (GIS) and remote sensing are applied widely for mapping land-use suitability. In this study, Van City, which is the most crowded city in eastern Turkey, was evaluated by applying three different scenarios called ecological, economic, and sustainable. The multi-criteria evaluation technique was used in GIS environment in the mapping stage. Distance from roads, distance from urban boundary, hillshade, slope, elevation, land-use cover, and land-use ability factors were used as inputs in the analysis stage. The weights of each input factor were calculated according to urban change dynamics between 2002 and 2015. As a result of the study, the weighting approach using the natural change dynamics of Van City has a great potential to define objective weights. In addition, Van City was developed orderly on agricultural lands and grasslands, and it was not a sustainable development for the region because the main income is still agriculture and animal production, so a new strategy was designed in a sustainable scenario to prevent agriculture and grassland area loss in a mutual benefit between nature and human

Using scenario modelling for adapting to urbanization and water scarcity: towards a sustainable city in semi-arid areas

Sustainable development on a global scale has been hindered by urbanization and water scarcity, but the greatest threat is from decision-makers ignoring these challenges, particularly in developing countries. In addition, urbanization is spreading at an alarming rate across the globe, affecting the environment and society in profound ways. This study reviews previous studies that examined future scenarios of urban areas under the challenges of rapid population growth, urban sprawl and water scarcity, in order to improve supported decision-making (SDM). Scholars expected that the rapid development of the urbanization scenario would cause resource sustainability to continually be threatened as a result of excessive use of natural resources. In contrast, a sustainable development scenario is an ambitious plan that relies on optimal land use, which views land as a limited and non-renewable resource. In consequence, estimating these threats together could be crucial for planning sustainable strategies for the long term. In light of this review, the SDM tool could be improved by combining the cellular automata model, water evolution and planning model coupled with geographic information systems, remote sensing and criteria analytic hierarchical process modelling. Urban planners could optimize, simulate and visualize the dynamic processes of land-use change and urban water, using them to overcome critical conditions

Cultural heritage and sustainable development targets : a possible harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other Goals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore, it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, therefore feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a methodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross‐comparison of a selected sample of publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus confirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culture in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets

Assessing sustainable development in industrial regions towards smart built environment management using Earth observation big data

This thesis investigates the sustainability of nationwide industrial regions using Earth observation big data, from environmental and socio-economic perspectives. The research contributes to spatial methodology design and decision-making support. New spatial methods, including the robust geographical detector and the concept of geocomplexity, are proposed to demonstrate the spatial properties of industrial sustainability. The study delivers scientific decision-making advice to industry stakeholders and policymakers for the post-construction assessment and future planning phases. The research has been published in prestigious geography journals, demonstrating its success

Role of Geographical Information System (GIS) for Eco-city Planning: A Review

The rapid expansion of cities expected to rise within population and global economic growth is increasing additional demand on natural resource that leads to land-use changes in particularly cities. In the present scenario, cities are becoming the center of human activities. Cities in developing countries become overpopulated and over-crowded as a result of the migration of population from rural to urban due to job opportunities, educational facilities, availability of health facilities etc. This has resulted in ever-growing size of cities, informal settlements environmental pollution, destruction of ecological structure and scarcity of natural resources and also leads to traffic congestion, housing shortage, unaffordable housing prices, crowded streets, degraded ecosystem, increasing demands for waste disposal and many others. Eco-cities have a strong potential to solve the urban challenges and derive to manage the environment and natural resources. This review article presents the brief on innovative uses of GIS techniques for eco-city planning. The purpose of this article is to provide information about GIS tool for planners, engineers and others to think about the impact of urban sprawl and to develop eco-city for sustainable development

THE NEED OF SPATIAL TYPOLOGIES IN TOURISM PLANNING AND POLICY MAKING - THE GREEK CASE

Greek tourism has been developed since the 70’s. Main scope of this development was the economic support of areas with rich natural and cultural capital. This process has created a number of effects (positive and negative ones) at the destination areas mainly because of the lack of integrated planning. The necessity for tourism planning in local, regional and national scale is obvious, especially when the main objective is the preservation and the competitiveness of the destination areas. Tourism development is differentiated from place to place and tourism policy must reflect that. A spatial typology for tourism development is necessary in order to develop sharper policy measures. In this paper we will examine a spatial typology that has been created for the Greek coasts for policy making.

Remote sensing and geographic information systems technics for spatial-based development planning and policy

Indonesia's land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) is a global concern. The relocation plan of the capital city of Indonesia to East Kalimantan will be becoming an environmental issue. Knowing the latest land cover change modeling and prediction research is essential for fundamental knowledge in spatial planning and policies for regional development. Five articles related to integrated technology of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing for spatial modeling were reviewed and compared using nine variables: title, journal (ranks), keywords, objectives, data sources, variables, location, method, and main findings. The results show that the variables that significantly affect LULCC are height, slope, distance from the road, and distance from the built-up area. The artificial neural network-based cellular automata (ANN-CA) method could be the best approach to model the LULCC. Furthermore, by the current availability of global multi-temporal and multi-sensor remote sensing data, the LULCC modeling study can be limitles

Simulating Urban Land Expansion in the Context of Land Use Planning in the Abuja City-Region, Nigeria

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into the possible future urban expansion. This study integrated empirical data derived from Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing, and surveys of experts to offer insights into the possible future urban expansion under spatial planning scenarios to support land use planning and environmental sustainability of city-regions. We analyzed the spatial determinants of urban expansion, calibrated the land cover model using the Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network and Markov, and developed three scenarios to simulate land cover from 2017 to 2030 and to 2050. The scenarios include Business As Usual that extrapolates past trends; Regional Land Use Plan that restricts urban expansion to the land designated for urban development, and; Adjusted Urban Land that incorporates the leapfrogged settlements into the land designated for urban development. Additionally, we quantified the potential degradation of environmentally sensitive areas by future urban expansion under the three scenarios. Results indicated a high, little, and no potential degradation of environmentally sensitive areas by the future urban expansion under the Business As Usual, Adjusted Urban Land, and Regional Land Use Plan scenarios respectively. The methods and the baseline information provided, especially from the Adjusted Urban Land scenario showed the possibility of balancing the need for urban expansion and the protection of environmentally sensitive areas. This would be useful to improve the environmental sustainability of the Sub-Saharan African city-regions and across the Global South, where insufficient data availability challenges land use planning.Peer Reviewe

Green infrastructure planning for climate smart and "green" cities

The aim of the paper is to present green infrastructure planning within the concept of climate-smart cities. In this context the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), as part of green infrastructure planning, is stressed in the establishment of climate-smart cities. In addition to presenting international examples of good practice, such as using GIS data, maps and tools for support in the USA, or designing a tool for water management and water infrastructure planning in Chicago, the paper provides an insight into the current status of green infrastructure planning in Serbia. The "Green regulation of Belgrade" project is presented as a representative example. The conclusions emphasise that the main preconditions for achieving climate-smart and green cities include legal and planning frameworks, as well as appropriate strategic and other programs that will further encourage the creation of GIS for green areas and create the conditions for climate-smart green infrastructure planning