Urban areas are critical zones where human built systems interact with one another and the environment at fine spatial and temporal scales. They drive global change through demand for resources and carbon emission, at the same time, their inhabitants and critical infrastructures are vulnerable to accelerating and compounding stresses from climate change, extreme weather, population growth, and land-use pressure.

Emerging scientific approaches that integrate insight across multiple systems and sectors are needed to inform complex tradeoffs faced by the world’s urban areas as they seek to increase resilience to these changing stressors.

This session invites studies that advance this aim through examination of coupled human and environmental systems, adaptation strategies and/or environmental justice.

Examples of interdisciplinary areas:

• Urban microclimate dynamics
• Urban hydrology: flood, groundwater and/or irrigation
• Urbanization, urban form, population growth
• Building energy consumption and anthropogenic heating
• Resilience to extreme heat/flood/drought risk
• Environmental justice
• Heterogeneity within urban areas
• water/energy security