Toward Heart-Healthy and Sustainable Cities: A Policy Statement From the American Heart Association.

Nearly 56% of the global population lives in cities, with this number expected to increase to 6.6 billion or >70% of the world's population by 2050. Given that cardiometabolic diseases are the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in people living in urban areas, transforming cities and urban provisioning systems (or urban systems) toward health, equity, and economic productivity can enable the dual attainment of climate and health goals.

Impact of Circular, Waste-Heat Reuse Pathways on PM-Air Quality, CO Emissions, and Human Health in India: Comparison with Material Exchange Potential.

India is home to 1.3 billion people who are exposed to some of the highest levels of ambient air pollution in the world. In addition, India is one of the fastest-growing carbon-emitting countries.

Characterizing COVID-19 waves in urban and rural districts of India.

Understanding spatial determinants, i.e., social, infrastructural, and environmental features of a place, which shape infectious disease is critically important for public health.

Measuring social equity in urban energy use and interventions using fine-scale data.

Cities seek nuanced understanding of intraurban inequality in energy use, addressing both income and race, to inform equitable investment in climate actions. However, nationwide energy consumption surveys are limited (<6,000 samples in the United States), and utility-provided data are highly aggregated. Limited prior analyses suggest disparity in energy use intensity (EUI) by income is ∼25%, while racial disparities are not quantified nor unpacked from income.

All urban areas' energy use data across 640 districts in India for the year 2011.

India is the third-largest contributor to global energy-use and anthropogenic carbon emissions. India's urban energy transitions are critical to meet its climate goals due to the country's rapid urbanization. However, no baseline urban energy-use dataset covers all Indian urban districts in ways that align with national totals and integrate social-economic-infrastructural attributes to inform such transitions.

Understanding subjective well-being: perspectives from psychology and public health.

Background: Individual subjective well-being (SWB) is essential for creating and maintaining healthy, productive societies. The literature on SWB is vast and dispersed across multiple disciplines. However, few reviews have summarized the theoretical and empirical tenets of SWB literature across disciplinary boundaries.

Impact of Urban Expansion and In Situ Greenery on Community-Wide Carbon Emissions: Method Development and Insights from 11 US Cities.

Biogenic CO emissions in cities are shaped by urban land cover change which can release carbon stocks, and, carbon sequestration by in situ vegetation. To date, these two processes have not been studied together and compared with transboundary fossil fuel-based CO emissions of urban energy use. We leverage remote sensing and machine learning to quantify biogenic CO emissions between 2006 and 2012, across 11 U.

Transboundary Environmental Footprints of the Urban Food Supply Chain and Mitigation Strategies.

Food supply has been the central issue of human development for millennia and has become increasingly critical in an urbanizing world. However, the environmental footprints and associated mitigation strategies of food consumption have rarely been comprehensively characterized at urban or regional scales. Here, we analyze the water, carbon, reactive nitrogen, and phosphorus footprints of food consumption in Chinese urban regions and demonstrate how such information can help to formulate tailored mitigation strategies.

Connecting Air Quality with Emotional Well-Being and Neighborhood Infrastructure in a US City.

Cities in the United States have announced initiatives to become more sustainable, healthy, resilient, livable, and environmentally friendly. However, indicators for measuring all outcomes related to these targets and the synergies between them have not been well defined or studied. One such relationship is the linkage between air quality with emotional well-being (EWB) and neighborhood infrastructure.

Impact of Locational Choices and Consumer Behaviors on Personal Land Footprints: An Exploration Across the Urban-Rural Continuum in the United States.

Land is a scarce resource. We develop consumption-based land footprints (CBLF) for urban and rural U.S.

Review on City-Level Carbon Accounting.

Carbon accounting results for the same city can differ due to differences in protocols, methods, and data sources. A critical review of these differences and the connection among them can help to bridge our knowledge between university-based researchers and protocol practitioners in accounting and taking further mitigation actions. The purpose of this study is to provide a review of published research and protocols related to city carbon accounting, paying attention to both their science and practical actions.

Demographic Inequities in Health Outcomes and Air Pollution Exposure in the Atlanta Area and its Relationship to Urban Infrastructure.

Environmental burdens such as air pollution are inequitably distributed with groups of lower socioeconomic statuses, which tend to comprise of large proportions of racial minorities, typically bearing greater exposure. Such groups have also been shown to present more severe health outcomes which can be related to adverse pollution exposure. Air pollution exposure, especially in urban areas, is usually impacted by the built environment, such as major roadways, which can be a significant source of air pollution.

Assessing Current Local Capacity for Agrifood Production To Meet Household Demand: Analyzing Select Food Commodities across 377 U.S. Metropolitan Areas.

Increasing food production in local urban and peri-urban areas is articulated as a potential way for local governments to achieve multiple sustainability outcomes (environmental, social, and human health). However, scientific judgements on localization are difficult to make because the degree of current food localization has not been systematically measured or defined across large numbers of cities. We develop new methods to quantify current local capacity for food production to meet total household agrifood demand, harmonizing bottom-up and top-down approaches to assess direct-plus-embodied agrifood demand of both fresh and processed foods.

What Is the Contribution of City-Scale Actions to the Overall Food System's Environmental Impacts?: Assessing Water, Greenhouse Gas, and Land Impacts of Future Urban Food Scenarios.

This paper develops a methodology for individual cities to use to analyze the in- and trans-boundary water, greenhouse gas (GHG), and land impacts of city-scale food system actions. Applied to Delhi, India, the analysis demonstrates that city-scale action can rival typical food policy interventions that occur at larger scales, although no single city-scale action can rival in all three environmental impacts. In particular, improved food-waste management within the city (7% system-wide GHG reduction) matches the GHG impact of preconsumer trans-boundary food waste reduction.

Exploring social and infrastructural factors affecting open burning of municipal solid waste (MSW) in Indian cities: A comparative case study of three neighborhoods of Delhi.

Open municipal solid waste (MSW)-burning is a major source of particulate matter emissions in developing world cities. Despite a legal ban, MSW-burning is observed ubiquitously in Indian cities with little being known about the factors shaping it. This study seeks to uncover social and infrastructural factors that affect MSW-burning at the neighborhood level.

Meta-principles for developing smart, sustainable, and healthy cities.

Policy directives in several nations are focusing on the development of smart cities, linking innovations in the data sciences with the goal of advancing human well-being and sustainability on a highly urbanized planet. To achieve this goal, smart initiatives must move beyond city-level data to a higher-order understanding of cities as transboundary, multisectoral, multiscalar, social-ecological-infrastructural systems with diverse actors, priorities, and solutions. We identify five key dimensions of cities and present eight principles to focus attention on the systems-level decisions that society faces to transition toward a smart, sustainable, and healthy urban future.

Characterizing the Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Open Burning of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in Indian Cities.

Open-burning of municipal solid waste (MSW) is a major source of PM emissions in developing world cities, but few studies have characterized this phenomenon at the city and intracity (neighborhood) scale relevant to human health impacts. This paper develops a consistent field method for measuring the spatial frequency of the incidence of MSW-burning and presents results in three neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic status (SES) in Delhi, India, observed in winter and summer over 2 years. Daily MSW-burning incidents ranged from 24 to 130/km2-day during winter and 5-87/km2-day during summer, with the highest intensity in low SES neighborhoods.

Quantifying carbon mitigation wedges in U.S. cities: near-term strategy analysis and critical review.

A case study of Denver, Colorado explores the roles of three social actors-individual users, infrastructure designer-operators, and policy actors-in near-term greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation in U.S. cities.

Greenhouse gas emission footprints and energy use benchmarks for eight U.S. cities.

A hybrid life cycle-based trans-boundary greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions footprint is elucidated at the city-scale and evaluated for 8 US cities. The method incorporates end-uses of energy within city boundaries, plus cross-boundary demand for airline/freight transport and embodied energy of four key urban materials [food, water, energy (fuels), and shelter (cement)], essential for life in all cities. These cross-boundary activities contributed 47% on average more than the in-boundary GHG contributions traditionally reported for cities, indicating significant truncation at city boundaries of GHG emissions associated with urban activities.

Greenhouse gas emissions from global cities.

The world's population is now over 50% urban, and cities make an important contribution to national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Many cities are developing strategies to reduce their emissions. Here we ask how and why emissions differ between cities.

A demand-centered, hybrid life-cycle methodology for city-scale greenhouse gas inventories.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting for individual cities is confounded by spatial scale and boundary effects that impact the allocation of regional material and energy flows. This paper develops a demand-centered, hybrid life-cycle-based methodology for conducting city-scale GHG inventories that incorporates (1) spatial allocation of surface and airline travel across colocated cities in larger metropolitan regions, and, (2) life-cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify the embodied energy of key urban materials--food, water, fuel, and concrete. The hybrid methodology enables cities to separately report the GHG impact associated with direct end-use of energy by cities (consistent with EPA and IPCC methods), as well as the impact of extra-boundary activities such as air travel and production of key urban materials (consistent with Scope 3 protocols recommended by the World Resources Institute).