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Abstract With climate change and urbanization, city planners and developers have increasing interest and practice in constructing, restoring, or incorporating wetlands as forms of green infrastructure to maintain water-related ecosystem services (WES). We reviewed studies that valued in functional or monetary units the water regulation and purification services of urban wetlands around the globe. We used the adaptive management cycle (AMC) as a heuristic to determine the step that a study would represent in the AMC, the connections between the cycle steps that were used or considered, and the stakeholders involved. Additionally, we identified the social, ecological, and/or technological dimension(s) of the environmental stressors and management strategies described by study authors. While use-inspired research on WES occurs throughout the globe, most studies serve to singularly assess problems or monitor urban wetlands, consider or use no connectors between steps, and involve no stakeholder groups. Both stressors and strategies were overwhelmingly multidimensional, with the social dimension represented in the majority of both. We highlight studies that successfully interfaced with cities across multiple steps, connectors, engaged stakeholder groups, and disseminated findings and skills to stakeholder groups. True use-inspired research should explicitly involve management systems that are used by city stakeholders and propose multidimensional solutions. 

The relationship between cities and wetland cover varies across the globe, with some cities converting wetlands to low‐ and high‐density urban cover and others preserving, conserving, or restoring wetlands, or constructing new ones. However, the scientific literature lacks studies relating changes in systemic flood risk in an urban stormwater management systems to changes in wetland cover. Furthermore, whether and how such relationships are affected by changing storm intensity under climate change is unknown. We present a case study on the effects of changes in urban wetland extent and storm intensity on flooding in an urban drainage system in Valdivia, Chile, under several co‐produced future scenarios and historical trends of development. We used data derived from stakeholder workshops and historical landcover to determine four plausible scenarios of urban development, plus one business‐as‐usual scenario, in Valdivia through the year 2080. Additionally, we used historical precipitation data and downscaled climate data to estimate event rainfall from extreme storms in the year 2080. We found that system flood volume and time the system was flooded increased with increasing wetland loss and rainfall volume. Mean rate and hour of peak discharge were unaffected by wetland loss. Infiltration's relative role in reducing flooding diminished as wetland loss increased. Cities may still experience dangerous and/or unacceptable flooding even with extensive wetland coverage and will likely need to pair conservation with additional improvements in their stormwater management systems and contributing watersheds. 

Flooding occurs at different scales and unevenly affects urban populations based on the broader social, ecological, and technological system (SETS) characteristics particular to cities. As hydrological models improve in spatial scale and account for more mechanisms of flooding, there is a continuous need to examine the re- lationships between flood exposure and SETS drivers of flood vulnerability. In this study, we related fine-scale measures of future flood exposure—the First Street Foundation’s Flood Factor and estimated change in chance of extreme flood exposure—to SETS indicators like building age, poverty, and historical redlining, at the parcel and census block group (CBG) scales in Portland, OR, Phoenix, AZ, Baltimore, MD, and Atlanta, GA. We used standard regression models and accounted for spatial bias in relationships. The results show that flood exposure was more often correlated with SETS variables at the parcel scale than at the CBG scale, indicating scale dependence. However, these relationships were often inconsistent among cities, indicating place-dependence. We found that marginalized populations were significantly more exposed to future flooding at the CBG scale. Combining newly-available, high-resolution future flood risk estimates with SETS data available at multiple scales offers cities a new set of tools to assess the exposure and multi-dimensional vulnerability of populations. These tools will better equip city managers to proactively plan and implement equitable interventions to meet evolving hazard exposure.