Advances in the Sustainability and Resilience Interface at the Urban and Regional Levels: Sciences, Plans, Policies, and Actions for the Next Challenging Decades

Dear Colleagues,

The current and next decades promise to be difficult ones. Long-anticipated resource scarcity, pollution, and global warming are all likely to become increasingly tangible, with the potential to drastically change the world as we know it, including cities and what nourishes them from the outside. Supply shortages, extreme weather, new health emergencies, and geopolitical tensions may depict uncertain scenarios that, however, cannot be left waiting, simply labelled as black swan events. Present evidence and scientific forecasts about climate change and its tipping points have recently led even United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to make desperate pleas for urgent action, since the very future of humanity is at stake.

Discourses on sustainability and resilience have multiplied in recent times, yet with frequently different meanings of these concepts and often with local or sectorial applications. We may argue that the present and upcoming challenges demand more: sustainability as the ambitious goal to restore human rhythms able to be also feasible in the future, starting from resource use, waste and pollution production, and induced climate change, without compromising the liveableness of the next (and—alas—also our) generations, and without forgetting the social dimensions, starting from equity; resilience as a no less ambitious effort to reduce the vulnerability of human systems, to overcome and to adapt to shocks and drastic changes, whose causes, partly triggered by past and present mistakes, must also be addressed through sustainability-seeking actions.

This Special Issue aims at addressing the underexplored sustainability and resilience interface by keeping in mind the deepest meanings of these concepts, as well as the uncertainty and the unpleasant hints about the turbulent era we are approaching. Of course, the past and existing valuable experiences with sustainability and resilience may be addressed and reported too, but their critical assessment and discussion, in light of the above, is strongly encouraged here.

While well aware of the pressing needs that may affect scientific research and professional practice (including, but not limited to, the dependency upon funding and structural disciplinary boundaries), hard times can be seen as an occasion to move further. Aware, critical, and forward-looking contributions about sciences, plans, policies, and actions to effectively reduce the unsustainability and increase the resilience of human systems in a difficult epoch like this are all welcome, with a preference for urban and regional systems and for their interconnections with the many sectors upon which they depend.

Dr. Silvio Cristiano
Guest Editor

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• ecological sustainability
• social sustainability
• resilience
• urban and regional systems