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Abstract Metropolitan cities and regions are vastly exposed to the global climate change impacts. The reasons for such exposure include the gradual urban encroachments to nearby peri‑urban areas that cause destruction of natural resources and ecosystem services. While policymakers and planners are struggling to make trade-offs between urban growth, environmental degradation and mitigating climate change impacts, limited evidence exists regarding the public perceptions on the matter. This study aims to address the question of how does the public perceive on the interplay between peri‑urban growth and climate change? The methodology concerns conducting an online survey with the peri‑urban dwellers (n = 659) from South East Queensland, Australia, and undertaking an exploratory factor analysis on the collected data. The study findings reveal that: (a) Younger and highly educated people are much stronger believers of climate change; (b) People composting at home have a stronger belief in human-induced climate change than those using solar energy, energy monitoring devices and harvesting rainwater; (c) Despite local impacts of climate change garb the attention of almost everyone, self-motivations towards shifting habits and taking actions for mitigating climate change are limited, and; (d) Government policies and actions for combatting climate crises are largely seen inadequate.

Climate change is the biggest global threat of our time. As a signatory nation of the Paris Agreement, Brazil has made a climate action commitment, and expressed its nationally determined contribution to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 37%. The Brazilian population is highly urban, and Brazilian cities are mostly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and the worst effects of global warming are experienced in cities. Hence, the fulfillment of the Brazilian climate commitments depends on the active engagement of municipalities. Nevertheless, the Brazilian national government does not monitor local climate actions, and it is not clear how local urban policy is aligned with climate action. In order to bridge this gap, this study tackles the question of: “Are, and if yes how, cities considering the climate emergency in their local planning mechanisms?” This question is investigated by placing five major Brazilian cities under the microscope. The methodological approach includes literature review and applied qualitative analysis to scrutinize how climate issues and actions are factored in urban planning regulations to verify if and to what extent local policies contribute to the fulfillment of the Brazilian nationally determined contribution, and sustainable development goals. The results disclose that investigated cities have adequately incorporated climatic issues in their urban planning mechanisms. However, policy concentrates more on adaptation rather than mitigation, and policy implementation yet to be realized.

Abstract Digitalisation of urban metabolism circularity provides policymakers, urban managers, planners and administrators with a useful tool for identifying, controlling and evaluating a wide range of data concerning the flows of social, environmental and economic resources. This approach is based on the crucial role of fixed and mobile digital infrastructures such as real-time monitoring stations, GPS tracking sensors, augmented reality, virtual sharing platforms, social media dashboards, smart grids, and the like in the development and strengthening of the quality and efficiency of the circularity of resources. For these reasons, the integration of digital technologies in mobility, waste, water and wastewater management, energy efficiency, safety, and so on, represents a crucial aspect for cities involved in the circularity of their urban metabolism. Through a systematic literature review and case study approaches, the analysis disclose a wide-range of initiatives adopted by several European circular cities that optimise the circularity of urban metabolic flows, and contributes to the efforts in increasing understanding and awareness of the digitalisation driven by the urban metabolism circularity.

In recent years, climate change belief across countries has gone through an enormous political debate. Due to different perspectives, the issue of climate change belief in relation to political orientations cannot be considered uniform. This study aims to identify different groups of respondents based on their level of knowledge concerning climate risk against their political orientations. This in return helps in understanding political bias in forming a climate change belief. The methodological approach of this study comprises two major steps. First, to carry out a public perception survey in South East Queensland, Australia. Second, to undertake a hierarchical cluster analysis to derive the groups of respondents with distinct political orientations regarding climate change beliefs. The findings disclose that: (a) Public stances about climate risk knowledge in the case study area are rigid and simply distributed between the two groups—i.e., ‘least concerned/mostly disagreed group’ and ‘highly concerned/mostly disagreed group’; (b) The ‘least concerned/mostly disagreed group’ is highly rigid on the stance that there is nothing like anthropogenic climate change, and; (c) Climate risk concerns of the ‘least concerned/mostly disagreed group’ do not influence significantly in guiding their voting decisions. The insights generated help in overcoming the knowledge gaps between climate risk believers and deniers, and thereby inform decision-makers in taking adequate measures to address climate risks and develop appropriate land use decisions.

While smart city transformation is a remarkably popular topic among urban policymakers across the globe, there is little evidence on how to evaluate a city’s smartness level accurately. This study aims to bridge this knowledge gap by applying a novel assessment framework to a case study context and generating useful insights. To achieve this aim, the study evaluates the smartness levels of 27 Brazilian state capital cities through the indicators of productivity and innovation, livability and well-being, sustainability and accessibility, governance and planning, and connectivity and innovation. This urban smartness analysis is conducted through a smart city assessment framework that brings up three categories of smart city performance types—i.e., leading, following, and developing. The findings of the analysis revealed that the common characteristics of cities with leading smartness performance are having: (a) a strong innovation ecosystem; (b) Specific legislation for developing entrepreneurship; (c) Training opportunities for skilled labor; and (d) Conditions for knowledge-based development and digital transformation offerings and readiness. The analysis identified the smartest cities in Brazil as follows: Florianópolis, São Paulo, Vitória, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, and Cuiabá. This study offers insights from the application of a novel method in the Brazilian context for the local authorities to consider adopting for smart city performance and progress analyses and subsequently making necessary interventions to transform their smart city policy and practice to realize their desired goals.

In many parts of the world, a rapid urbanization process is taking place at an unprecedented scale, and its drastic impacts on societies and the environment are evident. To combat the externalities of such rapid, and to a degree uncontrolled, development, many cities around the globe introduced various urban growth management policies. However, policy making—to provide sustainable outcomes, while generating growth opportunities—has been a daunting task for urban administrators. To ease the task, scenario-based planning methods are introduced to produce alternative visions for managing urban growth in sustainable ways by incorporating various socio-environmental issues. However, even though modelling urban growth and associated impacts based on these scenarios have emerged to strengthen and quantify the future of urban policies and related planning actions, this process has a number of glitches. Major issues include the uncertainties associated with the selection of suitable methods to generate scenarios, identify indicators to be used to assess scenarios, evaluate scenarios to prioritize for policy formulation, and assess the impacts of policy scenarios. This paper aims to address the challenge of developing suitable policy scenarios for sustainable urban growth. As for the methodological approach, the study undertakes a thorough review of the literature and current practices, and conducts a two-round Delphi survey—involving experts from public, private and academic sectors specialized in the fields of urban planning, environmental planning, social planning, transportation modelling, and economic development. The expert driven policy scenarios are validated in a local context by comparing findings against the policy options as proposed in the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2017 (Australia). The findings offer valuable guidelines for planners, modellers, and policy makers in adopting suitable methods, indicators, and policy priorities, and thus, easing the daunting task of generating sustainable policy solutions.

In the age of anthropogenic climate change, developing smart and sustainable transport systems is among the most popular urban policy debates [...]