Social-Ecological Neighborhood Approach in the Face of Climate Change

Abstract

The negative impact of climate change has created the need for an approach to achieve climate friendly sustain able and resilient urban communities. The sustainable neighborhood concept is closely linked with UN Habitat’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 by reducing the reverse environmental impacts of unsustainable planning and design implications. Neighborhoods function as core living environments in the city coupled with human natural systems and have complex intrinsic qualities. Neighborhood design is called for a human-in-nature system’s perspective to combat with negative consequences of urbanization process, namely vegetation degradation, to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In this context the social-ecological system (SES) resilience perspective has become instrumental since the SES denotes the concept of humans are part of nature and takes into consideration of system’s absorption, adaptation and learning capacities within multiscale dimensions. This paper, therefore, introduces an approach to define and address human-nature interaction in spatial, social, environmental, and economic dimensions in neighbor hood scale through the lens of the social-ecological system with a multi-scalar perspective.