Cities typically treat migration and sustainability as separate policy domains. When migration is highlighted in the context of sustainability in urban destination areas, it is typically understood to have no, or at worst, negative impacts on sustainability. As a result, migration and migrants are commonly left out of sustainability policy and planning. Here, we present emerging evidence to reframe the debate, demonstrating that migration is a force for sustainable development and that migrants can be sustainability actors in urban environments. We point to key action points for cities to better address the migration–sustainability nexus and harness this potential.

For long, migration has been recognized in literature as a force for societal transformations. Yet, mainstream policies dealing with sustainability generally downplay the role of migration. The Sustainable Development Goals, for example, frame migration as a temporary phenomenon needing management rather than as an integral part of sustainable development. As a result, cities generally overlook broader perspectives on migration and transformation in their sustainability strategies. Here, we present key policy insights building on an emerging field of research exploring the migration–sustainability nexus in urban governance. We focus specifically on the city scale, recognizing that cities are situated at the crossroads of migration and sustainability challenges and opportunities, bringing new possibilities to address current sustainability challenges. For example, migrants interact with their destination areas through influencing consumption behavior and resource conservation and migration contributes to sustainable development through the potential of enhancing wellbeing of residents. There is thus an urgent opportunity to address policy gaps to embrace the potentially transformative role of migration for sustainability transitions. We present critical action points to incorporate new insights into policymaking, emphasizing integrated, coordinated and reflexive approaches across all levels of governance.

Migration drives sustainable development. We show how urban governance can seize opportunities for transformation.

Effectively addressing climate change requires new approaches to action, implementation and social change. Urban societies are profoundly shaped by faith, with religion influencing the physical environment, institutional structures and lives of citizens. Consequently, there is a need to consider seriously religion's role in mobilizing or constraining climate action in cities. Research is presented that shows the potential of faith-based organizations and faith perspectives to minimize and adapt to climate impacts. A framework for sensitively engaging faith communities in urban climate policy is developed, based on the power of shared values among diverse stakeholder groups to mobilize climate action through partnerships.

Global environmental research and policy frameworks have begun to emphasize the importance of culture and multi-sector partnerships for urban sustainability governance. However, there has been little explicit attention paid to religion and belief as ubiquitous urban socio-cultural phenomena. This article reviews literature on the intersection of religion and climate change in the context of cities. Religious responses to climate change are presented as a typology spanning physicalities, practices, ‘prophetic’ imagination and policy arenas. Key themes are then intersected with areas of focal activity presented in the most recent IPCC reports. Religion is shown to offer both opportunities and barriers for effective urban climate adaptation and mitigation. A new model of religious-civic partnership is then developed as a framework for guiding urban climate policy implementation. This model presents religion as vital to shaping the ‘value landscape’ of cities and calls for collaborative action based on identifying, enriching and mobilizing shared values. As cities become increasingly more populous, heterogeneous, globally teleconnected and exposed to climate impacts, there is an urgent need for research and policy that effectively engages with the historic and evolving presence and impact of religion within urban environments.

Effective action on climate change in cities requires new modes of engagement with religious perspectives, grounded in shared values.

Tourism significantly boosts a nation's economic growth, but unrestrained practices can cause serious environmental damage. As an essential part of the tourism industry, hotels meet the fundamental needs of tourists. This study examines the sustainable environmental management practices of hotels in Malaysia. It finds that hotels prioritize cost-saving and short-term benefits over long-term environmental gains. The study also reveals variations in sustainable practices based on hotel location and star rating. These insights are useful for various stakeholders in developing strategies and initiatives to achieve sustainable development goals.

Sustainable environmental management practices (SEMP) are essential to pave the way toward achieving a net-zero emission sustainable future. This study explores the level of SEMP among hotels in Malaysia based on distinct categorizations of location and star ranking. The findings show that hotels in Malaysia adopt higher basic SEMPs but less advanced practices. However, the level of basic and advanced SEMPs in hotels differ according to their geographical locations and star ranking. The findings also suggest that hotels in Malaysia prioritize cost-saving practices and short-term benefits over the long-term benefits of sustainable practices. The study contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the variations in the sustainable practices among different categories of hotels. Further, the findings are helpful for practitioners and policymakers in designing tools and measures, and promoting initiatives that best suit different types of hotels. Such efforts are crucial to promote and accelerate the engagement of sustainability practices in hotels.

Evolutionary biology considers how organisms and populations change over multiple generations, and so is naturally focused on issues of sustainability through time. Yet, sustainability science rarely incorporates evolutionary thinking and most scientists and policy makers do not account for how evolutionary processes contribute to sustainability. Understanding the interplay between evolutionary processes and nature's contribution to people is key to sustaining life on Earth.

Evolution, the change in gene frequencies within populations, is a process of genetically based modification by descent, providing the raw material essential for adaptation to environmental change. Therefore, it is crucial that we understand evolutionary processes if we aim for a sustainable planet. We here contribute to this development by describing examples of contemporary, rapid evolutionary changes of concern for sustainability, specifically highlighting the global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and how the evolutionary toolbox allowed tracking the origins and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in real time and predicting potential future outbreaks. We also consider how urban development accelerates evolutionary processes such as altered phenotypic and physiological changes and the spread of infectious and zoonotic diseases. We show the importance of evolutionary concepts and techniques for public-health decision making. Many examples of the potential of evolutionary insights contributing to crucial sustainability challenges exist, including infectious and zoonotic diseases, ecosystem and human health, and conservation of natural resources. We thus join recent calls advocating for a stronger collaboration between evolutionary biologists and the sustainability community, increasing interdisciplinarity and the awareness about the knowledge of evolutionary processes for decision making and policies.

Evolution is fundamental to sustaining life on Earth and should be incorporated in sustainability measures and policies.

Cities in the distant past – as documented by archaeologists and historians – provide an extensive record of urban successes and failures, yet this information has had little impact on the field of sustainability science. I explore two reasons for this situation. First, these scholars have often failed to synthesize their data scientifically, and, second, they have not approached the transfer of past knowledge to present research in a rigorous manner. I organize discussion of these issues around three arguments for the present value of past cities: the urban trajectory argument, the sample size argument, and the laboratory argument.

I explore the different ways historical and archaeological data can be deployed to contribute to research on urban sustainability science, emphasizing issues of argumentation and epistemology. I organize the discussion around three types of argument. The urban trajectory argument exploits the long time series of early cities and urban regions to examine change at a long time scale. The sample size argument views the role of early cities as adding to the known sample of settlements to increase understanding of urban similarities and differences. The laboratory argument uses data from past cities to explicitly test models derived from contemporary cities. Each argument is examined for three contrasting epistemological approaches: heuristic analogs, case studies, and quantitative studies. These approaches form a continuum leading from lesser to greater scientific rigor and from qualitative to quantitative frameworks. Much past-to-present argumentation requires inductive logic, also called reasoning by analogy. Sustainability scientists have confused this general form of argument with its weakest version, known as heuristic analogs. I stress ways to improve methods of argumentation, particularly by moving research along the continuum from weaker to stronger arguments.

Better methods of argument allow the past record of urban success and failure to contribute to urban sustainability science.

The exponential growth of humanity's resource consumption over the last half-century has led to ecological decline while people's basic needs have not been universally satisfied. The ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridor concepts have gained global attention, providing frameworks in which the maximum allowable environmental impacts and the minimum social levels acceptable to lead a good life establish a guiding pathway to meet human needs whilst remaining within the Earth's carrying capacity. We apply this thinking to the urban mobility sector in this article in an attempt to formulate a ‘safe and just space’ for urban mobility.

The theoretical and broad application of the ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridor concepts are lacking in implementation due to a limited understanding of sectoral thresholds. This study highlights the weakness of sustainable urban mobility indicator studies which often lack connections to ecological ceilings and social foundations and, thus, lack the ability to show if a mobility system is intergenerationally sustainable or not. Therefore, this study aims to bridge this knowledge gap and develop a mobility sector-focused sustainable consumption corridor. It does so by using a collection of concepts and associated indicators ranging from sustainable urban mobility, sustainable consumption corridors, ecological thresholds, needs theory and mobility social impacts to mobility poverty. The output of this study is an initial design of a mobility-focused sustainable consumption corridor with suggested themes and indicators to measure the relative performance of a region in relation to the material dimensions of the corridor accompanied by a discussion surrounding spatial, temporal and sectoral corridor-defining thresholds. This work provides a novel first step in the direction of sector-based sustainable consumption corridors which can aid in providing a transformational alternative to the status quo through the implementation of safe and just sectors.

This article applies the ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridors to the urban mobility sector. It provides a framework for evaluating urban mobility systems in terms of their ecological impacts (the ‘ecological ceiling’) and providing for human needs (the ‘social floor’), and for defining a ‘safe and just space for urban mobility’.