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Abstract Maximizing the functional performance of urban green infrastructure is important to deliver critical ecosystem services that support human well-being. However, urban ecosystems are impacted by social and ecological filters that affect biodiversity, shaping how species’ traits are functionally expressed, thus affecting ecosystem services supply. Our Social–Ecological Traits Framework addresses the impacts of socio-ecological systems on the phenotypic expression of traits and ecosystem services delivery. This functional approach to examining the supply of ecosystem services can improve the incorporation of biodiversity knowledge in urban planning decisions for maximizing the effectiveness of ecosystem services as nature-based solutions under multiple types of social and environmental change. 

Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental complexity (i.e., requisite complexity), and iii) describe modes of SETS sensemaking for urban system structures and functions as basic tenets to build requisite complexity. SETS sensemaking is an undertaking to reflexively bring sustained adaptation, anticipatory futures, loose-fit design, and co-governance into organizational decision-making and to help reimagine institutional structures and processes as entangled SETS.

 

Abstract Urbanization and competing water demand, as well as rising temperatures and changing weather patterns, are manifesting as gradual processes that increasingly challenge urban water supply security. Cities are also threatened by acute risks arising at the intersection of aging infrastructure, entrenched institutions, and the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events. To better understand these multi-layered, interacting challenges of providing urban water supply for all, while being prepared to deal with recurring shocks, we present an integrated analysis of water supply security in New York City and its resilience to acute shocks and chronic disturbances. We apply a revised version of a recently developed, quantitative framework (‘Capital Portfolio Approach’, CPA) that takes a social-ecological-technological systems perspective to assess urban water supply security as the performance of water services at the household scale. Using the parameters of the CPA as input, we use a coupled systems dynamics model to investigate the dynamics of services in response to shocks—under current conditions and in a scenario of increasing shock occurrence and a loss of system robustness. We find water supply security to be high and current response to shocks to be resilient thanks to past shock experiences. However, we identify a number of risks and vulnerability issues that, if unaddressed, might significantly impact the city’s water services in the mid-term future. Our findings have relevance to cities around the world, and raise questions for research about how security and resilience can and should be maintained in the future.