Building green infrastructure to enhance urban resilience to climate change and pandemics

The looming climate crisis and the ongoing COVID- 19 pandemic have highlighted the importance of green infrastructure in and around cities, prompting an urgent call for more functional and sustainable urban planning and design. A number of recent studies have shown that green infrastructure offers a wide range of ecosystem functions and services essential to human wellbeing and urban sustainability (O’Brien et al. 2017; Staddon et al. 2018) which are of particular relevance under climatic and health crises. In this editorial we stress the importance of the existing green infrastructure to withstand climate change-induced stresses, namely those related to increasing climate variability and extreme temperature and precipitation events, and to contribute to human physical and mental health of urban dwellers during lockdown periods. In both cases, green infrastructure plays a major role in providing urban areas with resilience capacity that is key to urban sustainability. We also highlight the need to expand and improve green infrastructure, in particular in regions that are more vulnerable, based on integrative and participatory processes. This editorial was motivated by a webinar organized by the IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organizations) Landscape Ecology Working Party (https://iufrole-wp.weebly.com/) held on November 17th, 2020