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Foreword

P. K. Joshi

Global Climate Change largely impacts urban ecosystems and urban life. At the same time, the urban ecosystems are a key contributor to the global climate change. The recent reports on impacts of global climate change suggest that the impacts will be immense, enduring, and pernicious on entire human systems. Only scientific knowledge and actions at multiple scales can settle adaptation and mitigation to such impacts. However, to attempt this an interface between the urban ecosystems and the global climate change needs to be explored. The rate of urbanisation across the world has made it critical to keep urban ecosystems, their structural and functional components, and their dynamism central to the global environmental research and sustainability challenges. In fact, the science and policy communities have increasingly recognised this.

Urban Ecology and Global Climate Change is timely and a very welcome addition to the pertinent literature to unwrap the obstacles to adaptation and mitigation measures and sustainable development. It connects the relatively less known feedbacks between urban ecology and global environment change. The former is an eponymous discipline promoting resilient and sustainable urban spaces where human and nature coexist. The latter refers specifically to the rise in global temperatures since the mid‐twentieth century to the present and its unprecedented impacts. Thus, by bridging these two important disciplines, the book fills an important niche which is no longer possible to support through a few research papers. The conditions are too complex in both the areas, urbanisation and climate change; thus, interlinkages need to be understood, documented, and reported for the wider audience. I am pleased to see that this volume is successful in achieving this.

In a way, the book examines the interacting forces of urbanisation and global climate change that are currently shaping the ecology of urban centres and the scope of future planning, design, and management strategies, while enhancing the environmental, social, and cultural values of these novel ecosystems. The book presents a wide range of contemporary aspects of urban ecology that are useful in ecological research, and that I hope others will find of benefit in design of research, or in reading and evaluating ongoing developments. I must congratulate the editors and authors to address intersections of queries of ecologist, environmentalist, geographers, urban planners, policymakers, and general public in this volume. It will serve as a wonderful guide to prompt these stakeholders to embrace the ecological concept of sustainability and understand the basics of urban ecology to deal with the questions of global climate change to create functional urban landscape in this challenging era.

P. K. Joshi

Professor – School of Environmental Sciences

Chairperson – Special Centre for Disaster Research

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

2021