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Regenerative living cities and the urban climate–biodiversity–wellbeing nexus

The expansion of urban environments contributes to climate change and biodiversity loss. Implementing nature-based strategies to create ‘regenerative living cities’ will be critical for climate change mitigation and adaptation and will produce measurable biodiversity and wellbeing co-benefits.

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Fig. 1: The positive feedback loop between climate change and biodiversity loss in the urban built environment context.
Fig. 2: The Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.

Tuul & Bruno Morandi/The Image Bank/Getty

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the NUWAO (Nature-based Urban design for Wellbeing and Adaptation in Oceania) project, funded by a Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand (www.nuwao.org.nz). Additional support was provided by the Restoring Urban Nature Project funded by an Aotearoa New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour grant. The views expressed herein are the authors’ own.

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M.P.Z. conceived the concept for this Comment and led the project coordination. K.V. conceived of the graphics. All authors contributed to the research, writing and revising and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to M. Pedersen Zari.

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Pedersen Zari, M., MacKinnon, M., Varshney, K. et al. Regenerative living cities and the urban climate–biodiversity–wellbeing nexus. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 601–604 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01390-w

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