Publications

Xuemei Bai, Giles B. Sioen, Şiir Kilkiş, Timon McPhearson, Zeenat Niazi, Jago Dodson, Tri Atmaja, Kensuke Fukushi, Niki Frantzeskaki, Harini Nagendra, Wanyu Shih, Thomas Elmqvist, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Xiangzheng Deng, Burak Güneralp, Shuaib Lwasa, Noboru Zama. 2025. Reimagining urban science for global sustainability: Five strategic research areas. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2025.10025

Cities, as complex systems, are faced with increasingly diverse and connected challenges across social, economic, environmental, and health domains. To help cities address these challenges, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a cross-disciplinary urban research agenda through expert elicitations and extensive consultation. Five research themes to guide urban sustainability research were identified includi...

Elizabeth M. Cook, Yeowon Kim, Nancy B. Grimm, Timon McPhearson, Pippin Anderson, Harriet Bulkeley, Marcus J. Collier, Loan Diep, Jordi Morató, Weiqi Zhou. 2025. Nature-based solutions for urban sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315909122

The objective of this paper is to introduce a Special Feature: “Nature-based Solutions for Urban Sustainability”—a collection of four articles addressing the current state of global urban NbS science and conceptual framings. The special feature explores opportunities for research and practice to scale up NbS to address equity, justice, and inclusion while enabling transformation in urbanized areas. The special feature includes...

Loan Diep, Timon McPhearson. 2025. Empowering cities globally: Four levers for transformative urban adaptation with nature-based solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315912121

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that upcoming decades are likely to be accompanied with an increase in climate impacts in urban areas, thereby stressing the need for empowering cities to help them address the challenges ahead by closing the urban adaptation gap. The lock-in systems in which cities are often trapped create resistance to change and leads to missed opportunities to cocrea...

Timon McPhearson, Niki Frantzeskaki, Alessandro Ossola, Loan Diep, Pippin M. L. Anderson, Timothy Blatch, Marcus J. Collier, Elizabeth M. Cook, Christina Culwick Fatti, Zbigniew J. Grabowski, Nancy B. Grimm, Dagmar Haase, Pablo Herreros-Cantis, Jessica Kavonic, Brenda B. Lin, Duván H. Lopez Meneses, A. Marissa Matsler, Magnus Moglia, Jordi Morató, Patrick O’Farrell, Parama Roy, Chandni Singh, Jing Wang, Weiqi Zhou. 2025. Global synthesis and regional insights for mainstreaming urban nature-based solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315910121

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as a key strategy for sustainably addressing multiple urban challenges, with rapidly increasing knowledge production requiring synthesis to better understand whether and how NbS work in different social, ecological, economic, or governance contexts. Insights in this Perspective are drawn from a thematic review of 61 NbS review articles supported by an expert assessment of NbS knowledge...

Niki Frantzeskaki, Katinka Wijsman, Nadja Kabisch, Timon McPhearson. 2025. Inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge is critical for nature-based solutions to contribute to just urban transformations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315911121

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are used to transform existing unsustainable and undesirable path dependencies in cities. For NBS to contribute to just urban transformations, a stronger inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge base is needed. This knowledge base is essential to engage with six complex yet crucial questions about NBS, including “for what?,” “which nature?,” “where?,” “how?,” “when,” and “for whom?.” To address these...

Pablo Herreros-Cantis, Svetlana Khromova, Marta Olazabal, Timon McPhearson, Johannes Langemeyer, Marc B. Neumann. 2025. Knowledge diversity for climate change adaptation: A social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) approach to mental models. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105550

As climate-driven extreme weather events continue to intensify, risk mitigation and governance are a critical aspect of urban climate change adaptation. Interdisciplinary knowledge integration is critical in order to account for varied perspectives related to the impacts of extreme weather events on urban systems. Despite advances made to integrate different strands of knowledge through systems-based approaches, few methods ex...

Felix Creutzig, Timon McPhearson, Ronita Bardhan, Camille Belmin, Winston T. L. Chow, Matthias Garschagen, Angel Hsu, Şiir Kılkış, Sheikh Tawhidul Islam, Nikola Milojevic-Dupont, Minal Pathak, Rafael H. M. Pereira, Pourya Salehi, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz. 2025. Bridging the scale between the local particular and the global universal in climate change assessments of cities. Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00226-w

Identifying gaps in urban climate change assessment is crucial for developing the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on cities. To bridge the gap between the understanding of local interventions and global climate goals, we call for the strengthening of assessment tools such as urban typologies, case study synthesis and big geospatial data studies. We sort research gaps into five overarching th...

Ryan Hoff, Ryan Sparks, Mikhail Chester, Ahmed Mustafa, Nathan Johnson, Adam Birchfield, Timon McPhearson, Rui Li, Nasir Ahmad, Ian Searles. 2025. Cascading Failure Propagation and Perfect Storms in Interdependent Infrastructures. ASCE OPEN: Multidisciplinary Journal of Civil Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1061/AOMJAH.AOENG-0045

The increasingly complex conditions that are reshaping environments demand novel analysis of infrastructure weaknesses and behavior. Of critical concern are cascading failures and how small disruptions can spiral into large-scale outages. Significant evidence indicates infrastructures are increasingly stressed given a combination of disruptions including extreme climate events, disrepair, cyberattacks, and emerging and disrupt...

Maya Dutta, Pablo Herreros-Cantis, Timon McPhearson, Ahmed Mustafa, Matthew I. Palmer, Mika Tosca, Jennifer Ventrella, Elizabeth M. Cook. 2025. New York City 2100: Environmental justice implications of future scenarios for addressing extreme heat. Landscape and Urban Planning. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2024.105249

Climate-driven hazards, such as extreme heat or precipitation, are threatening the current and future livability of New York City (NYC) and disproportionately affecting low-income communities and communities of color. To envision future climate resilience, government stakeholders and researchers co-produced future scenarios for 2100 in response to climate hazards for NYC during participatory workshops in Fall 2021. A commonly ...

Artur Branny, Erik Andersson, Timon McPhearson. 2025. Micro-climate of nature-based solutions in stockholm royal seaport. Nature-Based Solutions. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbsj.2024.100206

Extreme weather events are on the rise, increasingly impacting cities and their urban populations. In response, urban greening and nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as key approaches for reducing risks from multiple types of extreme climate and weather events while making a positive impact on urban social and environmental inequities. NbS interventions are high on urban agendas worldwide, but in practice, they often ar...