Green Infrastructure for Climate-Resilient Cities: Governance, Equity, and Spatial Planning

Cities worldwide face mounting pressures from climate change, including rising temperatures, increased flooding, and deteriorating air quality, which disproportionately affect socially and economically marginalized urban populations. As urban agglomerations expand, the conversion of ecological and agricultural land into built-up areas intensifies landscape ecological risks and erodes the natural systems cities depend on for resilience. Green infrastructure (parks, urban forests, green corridors, wetlands, and permeable surfaces) has emerged as a critical strategy for mitigating these risks while delivering co-benefits for public health, social cohesion, and environmental quality. Yet planning, implementation, and governance remain uneven across and within cities, shaped by divergent policy frameworks, land use pressures, and entrenched socio-spatial inequalities. Understanding how governance structures and spatial planning approaches can deliver green infrastructure that is both effective and equitable is therefore an urgent area of inquiry. At the same time, cities are undergoing broader infrastructure transitions driven by decarbonization, digitalization, and new mobility and energy systems such as electrified transport and distributed energy systems, which are increasingly reshaping urban flows, service provision, and patterns of accessibility. These changes raise new questions about how green infrastructure can be planned not in isolation, but in coordination with other infrastructure systems central to climate resilience.This Research Topic aims to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between green infrastructure planning, urban governance, and social equity in climate adaptation. It seeks to address a central question: how can urban governance and spatial planning frameworks be designed or reformed to integrate green infrastructure as a core component of climate resilience, while ensuring its benefits are distributed equitably across diverse urban communities? Contributors are encouraged to examine social, spatial, and political dimensions of these challenges, moving beyond purely technical assessments to explore how community participation, institutional arrangements, and policy design shape the provision and accessibility of green infrastructure. We particularly welcome analyses using data-driven, remote sensing, geospatial, and AI-enabled methods to evaluate landscape ecological risks, land use transformations, and the distributional outcomes of green infrastructure interventions at multiple scales, from neighborhoods to urban agglomerations. We also welcome novel studies examining how broader infrastructure transitions, including emerging mobility, renewable energy, and digitalization, may reinforce or reshape green infrastructure’s role in climate adaptation. By bringing together diverse perspectives and methods, this collection aims to generate actionable knowledge for researchers, planners, and policymakers working to build more just and climate-resilient cities.This Research Topic invites contributions on themes including, but not limited to: • Governance models for equitable green infrastructure planning and implementation• Spatial planning frameworks for urban climate resilience• Landscape ecological risk assessment in urban agglomerations• The role of big data, remote sensing, and AI in monitoring urban environmental change and identifying inequities• Collaborative management of ecological, agricultural, and built-up spaces• Community engagement and environmental justice in climate adaptation• Distributional equity in access to urban green spaces• Housing and land use policy in the context of climate risk• Comparative studies across cities or regions in the Global South and Global North. • Integration of green infrastructure with transport, energy, and digital systems• Digital twins, simulation, and scenario-based approaches for integrated resilience assessment and decision supportWe welcome Original Research, Reviews, Perspectives, Policy Briefs, and Policy and Practice Reviews. Submissions should offer strong conceptual grounding supported by robust empirical evidence, using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods approaches. We particularly welcome articles about Original Research, Policy Reviews and Systematic Literature Reviews (length: 12,000 words). The suggested structure for articles includes the following sections: Introduction; Literature review/Conceptual discussion; Methodology (if applicable); Analysis - including discussion; Conclusion. For more information, please see the Guidelines for Authors Topic editors: Jian ZHUO, Qiming Ye Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80832/green-infrastructure-for-climate-resilient-cities-governance-equity-and-spatial-planning