286 publications from this institution
Urbanisation and climate change have increased the need for equitable access and visibility of urban green and blue spaces (GBS), to promote the sustainability and resilience of cities and to improve the well-being of their inhabitants. In this paper, we test an implementation of the newly proposed guideline to achieve equitable greening, the 3-30-300 rule, in three European cities: Paris Region (France), Aarhus Municipality (Denmark), and Grad Velika Gorica (Croatia). In this analysis, every residential building should have at least three viewable trees, 30% neighbourhood GBS cover, and a GBS of at least 1 hectare within 300 m. Our results show that none of the cities currently meet any of these three components, and the three cities differed in which rules were most closely met. In our implementation, substantial changes were needed in all cities to meet the guidelines: 12.6% of Paris, 10% of Aarhus, and 18.4% of Velika Gorica's urban footprint were converted to grass or tree cover, with implications for >100,000 buildings and >900,000 inhabitants. Our study discusses how existing conditions in each city impacted the viability of meeting the rule and proposes key considerations for future implementations of such guidelines, drawing on examples of innovative GBS already implemented globally.
Soil organic matter (SOM) is an indicator of sustainable land management as stated in the global indicator framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Indicator 15.3.1). Improved forecasting of future changes in SOM is needed to support the development of more sustainable land management under a changing climate. Current models fail to reproduce historical trends in SOM both within and during transition between ecosystems. More realistic spatio-temporal SOM dynamics require inclusion of the recent paradigm shift from SOM recalcitrance as an 'intrinsic property' to SOM persistence as an 'ecosystem interaction'. We present a soil profile, or pedon-explicit, ecosystem-scale framework for data and models of SOM distribution and dynamics which can better represent land use transitions. Ecosystem-scale drivers are integrated with pedon-scale processes in two zones of influence. In the upper vegetation zone, SOM is affected primarily by plant inputs (above- and belowground), climate, microbial activity and physical aggregation and is prone to destabilization. In the lower mineral matrix zone, SOM inputs from the vegetation zone are controlled primarily by mineral phase and chemical interactions, resulting in more favourable conditions for SOM persistence. Vegetation zone boundary conditions vary spatially at landscape scales (vegetation cover) and temporally at decadal scales (climate). Mineral matrix zone boundary conditions vary spatially at landscape scales (geology, topography) but change only slowly. The thicknesses of the two zones and their transport connectivity are dynamic and affected by plant cover, land use practices, climate and feedbacks from current SOM stock in each layer. Using this framework, we identify several areas where greater knowledge is needed to advance the emerging paradigm of SOM dynamics-improved representation of plant-derived carbon inputs, contributions of soil biota to SOM storage and effect of dynamic soil structure on SOM storage-and how this can be combined with robust and efficient soil monitoring.
