Riccardo Valentini

Elvira Dovletyarova

Viacheslav I. Vasenev

Zhongqi Chen

This interdisciplinary proceedings book addresses highly relevant topics in urbanization and its environmental impacts and presents case studies revealing the negative environmental consequences of the anthropogenic and technogenic pressures. Urbanization is an important trend in current land-use change, with up to 70% of the world population projected to live in cities by 2050. How will this rapid urbanization alter the face of Europe? What are the environmental consequences of the expansion of megacities? These and other important questions are addressed in the Megacities 2050 Proceedings of the VI International Conference on Landscape Architecture to Support City Sustainable Development. Megapolises are complex ecosystems, and their air and water quality, vegetation and soils are exposed to anthropogenic influences. The book discusses advanced approaches and techniques to monitor, model and assess environmental consequences and risks in megapolises and offers solutions to the environmental problems of modern megapolises. It also presents successful, sustainable urban-development projects from Europe and beyond, including the management and design of green infrastructure, waste management, run-off purification and remediation of urban soils. Focusing on urban soils and ecosystems, the book is intended for experts in various fields of geography, urban studies and planning, and environmental sciences, including those in the scientific and research community, municipal services, environmental protection agencies, stakeholders working in urban management and greenery, landscape architects, civil engineers and policy-makers.

Proceedings of the VI International Conference on Landscape Architecture to Support City Sustainable Development

Megacities 2050: Environmental Consequences of Urbanization

Viacheslav Vasenev

Zhongqi Cheng

Carlo Calfapietra

Luis Inostroza

Michael Leuchner

This proceedings book focuses on advanced technologies to monitor and model urban soils, vegetation and climate, including internet of things, remote sensing, express and non-destructive techniques. The Smart and Sustainable Cities (SSC) conference is a regular event, organized each second year in RUDN University (Russia) and providing a multidisciplinary platform for scientists and practitioners in urban environmental monitoring, modeling, planning and management.

Proceedings of Smart and Sustainable Cities 2020

Advanced Technologies for Sustainable Development of Urban Green Infrastructure

These proceedings of the Smart and Sustainable Cities Conference (SSC) in Moscow from May 23 to 26, 2018 addresses important questions regarding the global trend of urbanization. What are the environmental consequences of megacities’ expansion? What smart solutions can make life in cities safe, comfortable and environmentally friendly? It is projected that 70% of the global population will live in cities by 2050, and as such the book describes how this rapid urbanization will alter the face of the world. Focusing on solutions for the environmental problems of modern megapolises, it discusses advanced approaches and smart technologies to monitor, model and assess the environmental consequences and risks. The contributors present examples of successful sustainable urban development, including management and design of green infrastructure, waste management, run-off purification and remediation of urban soils. The SSC conference and its proceedings offer a valuable contribution to sustainable urban development, and are of interest to the scientific and research community, municipal services, environmental protection agencies, landscape architects, civil engineers, policy makers and other stakeholders in urban management and greenery.

Proceedings of the Smart and Sustainable Cities Conference 2018

Green Technologies and Infrastructure to Enhance Urban Ecosystem Services

Han Dolman

A. Freibauer

This book assesses the current greenhouse gas (GHG) monitoring capabilities of Europe, identifies and quantifies the uncertainties involved, and outlines the direction to a continental scale GHG monitoring network. The book uniquely addresses both the methodology of carbon cycle science and the science itself, providing a synthesis of carbon cycle science. The methods included provide the first comprehensive coverage of a full GHG accounting and monitoring system.

The Continental-Scale Greenhouse Gas Balance of Europe

Marta Antonelli

John L. Sievenpiper

Katarzyna Dembska

This publication offers a systemic analysis of sustainability in the food system, taking as its framework the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations. Targeted chapters from experts in the field cover main challenges in the food system and propose methods for achieving long term sustainability. Authors focus on how sustainability can be achieved along the whole food chain and in different contexts. Timely issues such as food security, climate change and migration and sustainable agriculture are discussed in depth. The volume is unique in its multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach. Chapter authors come from a variety of backgrounds, and authors include academic professors, members of CSO and other international organizations, and policy makers. This plurality allows for a nuanced analysis of sustainability goals and practices from a variety of perspectives, making the book useful to a wide range of readers working in different areas related to sustainability and food production. The book is targeted towards the academic community and practitioners in the policy, international cooperation, nutrition, geography, and social sciences fields. Professors teaching in nutrition, food technology, food sociology, geography, global economics, food systems, agriculture and agronomy, and political science and international cooperation may find this to be a useful supplemental text in their courses.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals Through Sustainable Food Systems

Franco Miglietta

The book addresses in a comprehensive way the full greenhouse gases budget of the Italian landscape, focusing on land use and terrestrial ecosystems. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of terrestrial ecosystems with regard to the carbon cycle and only recently a regional approach has been considered for its specificity in terms of new methodologies for observations and models and its relevance for national policies on mitigation and adaptation to climate changes. In terms of methods this book describes the role of flux networks and data-driven models, airborne regional measurements of fluxes and specific sectoral approaches related to important components of the human and natural landscapes. There is also a growing need on the part of institutions, agencies and policy stakeholders for new data and analyses enabling them to improve their national inventories of greenhouse gases and their compliance with the UNFCCC process. In this respect the data presented is a basis for a full carbon accounting and available to relevant stakeholders for improvements and/or verification of national inventories. The wealth of research information is the result of a national project, CARBOITALY, which involved 15 Italian institutions and several researchers to provide new data and analyses in the framework of climate policies.

An Insight on Managed and Natural Terrestrial Ecosystems

The Greenhouse Gas Balance of Italy

Raffaello Cervigni

Monia Santini

If not addressed in time, climate change is expected to exacerbate Nigeria’s current vulnerability to weather swings and limit its ability to achieve and sustain the objectives of Vision 20:2020 [as defined in http://www.npc.gov.ng /home/doc.aspx?mCatID=68253]. The likely impacts include: • A long-term reduction in crop yields of 20–30 percent • Declining productivity of livestock, with adverse consequences on livelihoods • Increase in food imports (up to 40 percent for rice long term) • Worsening prospects for food security, particularly in the north and the southwest • A long-term decline in GDP of up to 4.5 percent The impacts may be worse if the economy diversifies away from agriculture more slowly than Vision 20:2020 anticipates, or if there is too little irrigation to counter the effects of rising temperatures on rain-fed yields. Equally important, investment decisions made on the basis of historical climate may be wrong: projects ignoring climate change might be either under- or over-designed, with losses (in terms of excess capital costs or foregone revenues) of 20–40 percent of initial capital in the case of irrigation or hydropower. Fortunately, there is a range of technological and management options that make sense, both to better handle current climate variability and to build resilience against a harsher climate: • By 2020 sustainable land management practices applied to 1 million hectares can offset most of the expected shorter-term yield decline; gradual extension of these practices to 50 percent of cropland, possibly combined with extra irrigation, can also counter-balance longer-term climate change impacts. • Climate-smart planning and design of irrigation and hydropower can more than halve the risks and related costs of making the wrong investment decision. The Federal Government could consider 10 short-term priority responses to build resilience to both current climate variability and future change through actions to improve climate governance across sectors, research and extension in agriculture, hydro-meteorological systems; integration of climate factors into the design of irrigation and hydropower projects, and mainstreaming climate concerns into priority programs, such as the Agriculture Transformation Agenda.

Toward Climate-Resilient Development in Nigeria

Riccardo Valentini

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