On August 21, 2023, Elizabeth M. Cook, assistant professor of environmental science, alongside an international team of experts on climate change and urban resilience, published a new article in the journal Sustainability Science titled, “Assessing resilience, equity, and sustainability of future visions across two urban scales.”
In this paper, the authors emphasize the need for cities to prepare and plan for extreme climate events. Participatory visioning, or the process of co-producing ideas for solutions with the participation of a community’s leaders, shows promise as a strategy, but Cook and her colleagues explain that there is a lack of comprehensive methods for evaluating and comparing these co-produced visions so that they can best inform official decision-making.
To address this gap, Cook and her colleagues developed a qualitative evaluation method for comparing resilience, sustainability, and equity characteristics of future planning visions and initiatives. Specifically, Cook and colleagues compared regional and neighborhood visions from Phoenix, AZ, and found regional visions aligned more with a sustainability-focused agenda, whereas neighborhood-scale visions focused more on social issues and emphasized equity-driven approaches. The researchers assert that these visions have important implications for future trajectories in combating climate change and all its effects, and more work needs to be done to explore how diverse visions of future resilience may interact in complementary, synergistic, or antagonistic ways.