This week’s research looks at how resilience is shaped not only by physical interventions, but by the social conditions, values and institutional frameworks that determine how those interventions work. Across urban greening, childhood experiences of nature, marketing strategies, and heat adaptation, the studies show that sustainability outcomes depend on what is maintained over time, how people understand their relationship with ecological systems, and whether benefits and burdens are distributed fairly.
Read below for highlights and links on:
Urban Tree Resilience: Sustained canopy growth can reduce mortality, with especially important benefits in hotter and historically underserved neighborhoods.
Childhood Nature Matters: Diverse early experiences with nature can help shape environmental values and later support for biodiversity restoration.
Regenerative Marketing: Marketing education needs to move beyond growth, consumption and incremental sustainability toward socio-ecological and regenerative thinking.
Thermal Justice: Urban cooling strategies should be assessed by how heat risks, costs and benefits are distributed across people, places and ecosystems.
Urban Tree Resilience
This study examines how changes in urban tree canopy are associated with mortality across Chicago. Using neighborhood-level data from 2011–2021, the researchers find that while the amount of existing tree cover alone was not significantly associated with overall mortality, year-to-year increases in canopy were linked to substantially lower death rates, including from cardiovascular, respiratory, mental health and some musculoskeletal conditions.
The benefits were especially pronounced in hotter neighborhoods, while parts of Chicago’s South and West sides experienced greater canopy loss alongside higher temperatures and mortality. The findings suggest that urban resilience depends not simply on planting more trees, but on protecting and maintaining canopy over time, particularly in heat-vulnerable and historically underserved communities. The authors estimate that a sustained 0.03% annual increase in Chicago’s tree canopy—roughly equivalent to planting 14,000 trees—was associated with about 105 fewer deaths per year.
Read more: Increasing Urban Tree Canopy Associated With Reduced Mortality: A Longitudinal Analysis of Chicago Neighborhoods (GeoHealth, American Geophysical Union)
Childhood Nature Matters
This study examines how childhood experiences with nature shape environmental values and support for biodiversity restoration later in life. Drawing on a survey of nearly 3,500 residents in Greater Copenhagen, the authors find that people who experienced nature more frequently—and especially in a greater variety of ways—during childhood tended to hold stronger biospheric and altruistic values as adults. Those reporting more than 15 distinct childhood nature experiences showed particularly strong pro-biodiversity value orientations.
The study suggests that the relationship between childhood nature experiences and adult support for biodiversity restoration is largely indirect: biospheric values mediated more than half of the association between early nature experiences and pro-biodiversity attitudes. At the same time, these effects were modest, highlighting how place attachment, socioeconomic conditions and other contextual factors shape whether environmental values translate into support for particular restoration projects. The findings point to the importance of creating diverse and meaningful opportunities to engage with nature throughout childhood—and across the life course—as cities become increasingly important settings for human–nature relationships.
Read more: Forging environmentalism: The influence of childhood nature experiences on people’s pro-biodiversity value orientations and attitudes (People and Nature, British Ecological Society)
Rewriting the Marketing Playbook
This article argues that mainstream marketing education remains locked into high-carbon assumptions even as climate change becomes increasingly central to business and society. Analysing the 10 top-selling introductory marketing textbooks alongside a survey of 200 marketing educators, the authors find that climate-related content has increased but is still largely treated as an add-on—framed through technological innovation, corporate leadership, consumer choice and “win-win” sustainability rather than through questions of overconsumption, growth, ecological limits and systemic transition.
Using systems thinking, the article shows how textbooks, publishers, business schools, accreditation systems and educators reinforce one another to reproduce this dominant model. It calls for a shift from growth to regeneration, demand stimulation to needs-based provisioning, CSR to systemic transformation, and static textbooks to more adaptive forms of learning. Regenerative marketing education, in this account, would prepare students to understand markets as embedded within socio-ecological systems and equip them with the systems, normative and transformative knowledge needed to support net-zero and regenerative economies.
Read more: We don’t need no transformation: how marketing myopia is failing the climate generation (Journal of Marketing Management, Taylor & Francis)
Thermal Justice
This Nature Climate Change comment argues that urban heat adaptation should be evaluated not only by how much cooling it provides, but by who benefits, who bears the costs, and whether cooling shifts heat-related risks elsewhere. The authors introduce a thermal justice framework centred on “thermal displacement”: the transfer of heat burdens across places, populations, technologies, ecosystems and generations—for example, when greening raises rents and displaces lower-income residents, or when air conditioning cools indoor spaces while adding waste heat and energy demand outdoors.
The framework brings together five dimensions—distribution, recognition, participation, capabilities and ecological justice—to shift attention from simply delivering cooling infrastructure toward ensuring that people and ecosystems can actually function safely under heat. The article argues that effective adaptation must therefore combine cooling with housing protections, affordable energy, community participation, biodiversity and water considerations, and long-term maintenance, so that urban resilience does not reproduce existing inequalities or create new ecological vulnerabilities.
Read more: Thermal justice in urban climate change adaptation (Nature Climate Change, Springer Nature)
The regenerative business practices and sustainability innovations highlighted in this week’s Regenerative Insights directly tackle the critical issues of corporate responsibility explored in my recent book explored in my recent book, The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.
