Urban Ecology and Climate Change

Extensive growth in human population, rapid urbanisation, and climate change mediated extreme weather conditions are the three major challenges the world is facing today. Among these challenges, rapid urbanisation can be seen as playing catalytic role in land-use changes and waste generation mediating the processes responsible for the global climate change. Rapid conversion of pervious lands to impervious surfaces during the process of urbanisation is deteriorating the inherent ecosystem services of the natural ecosystems provided to the humankind. Moreover, pseudo-adaptation technologies based on extensive energy consumption and natural resource exploration are further adding to the causes for the happening of the climate change phenomenon. Now the scientific communities and even the common people have developed an understanding of the protection and maintenance of the natural vegetation to mitigate the climate change-related extreme weather conditions. The concept of urban ecology is getting wider attention in the recent years. Green infrastructure, green space development, and water-resource maintenance can be seen as the major policy measures for the recent urban developments. In addition, preservation of local floral and faunal diversity by the government and urban inhabitants has also been observed in the recent studies. In this chapter, we will provide a brief understanding of the urbanisation-climate change nexus. Further, elaboration of the emergent climate change adaptation and mitigation measures to be considered in the urban ecosystems has been done in the latter part of the chapter. A bibliometric analysis was performed for collating the studies related to the urban ecology-climate change nexus published during the past two decades. Overall, this chapter will be briefly introducing the problems associated with rapid urbanisation in the climate change scenario and the possible nature-based mitigation strategies with respect to the urban ecology principles.