Authors of the article declare that, with growing health risks from climate change and a trend of increasing carbon emissions from coal, it is time for China to take action. The 2023 China report of the Lancet countdown continues to track progress on health and climate change in China, while now also attributing the health risks of climate change to human activities and providing examples of feasible and effective climate solutions.

Article describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented losses for small businesses in cities across the globe. The authors' study examines the spatial distribution of PPP loans at the neighborhood level.

Article describes how soil moisture (SM) and atmospheric humidity (AH) are crucial climatic variables that significantly affect the climate system. However, the combined influencing mechanisms of SM and AH on the land surface temperature (LST) under global warming are still unclear. The authors systematically analyzed the interrelationships among annual mean values of SM, AH, and LST using ERA5-Land reanalysis data and revealed the role of SM and AH on the spatiotemporal variations of LST through mechanism analysis and regression methods.

Article describes how there is a growing need to apply geospatial artificial intelligence analysis to disparate environmental datasets to find solutions that benefit frontline communities. This research addresses these challenges by leveraging a strategically deployed, extensive low-cost sensor (LCS) network that was rigorously calibrated through an optimized neural network.

Article describes how forests are generally extracted from remotely sensed images based on the spectral features, ignoring other important auxiliary information, and the techniques of precise extraction need to be further improved. By using the Sentinel–2 image and auxiliary factors (AFs) including site conditions (SCs) and vegetation indices (VIs), the random forest model with AFs (RF–AFs) was adopted for the extraction of the economic forests in Lancang County, which is a mountainous area with rich biodiversity and is witnessing rapid development of economic forests in Yunnan province of China.

Article asserts that individual tree structure mapping in cities is important for urban environmental studies. The authors produced an individual tree dataset including tree locations, height, crown area, crown volume, and biomass over the entire New York City, USA for 6,005,690 trees, which enables the evaluation of urban forest ecosystem services.

Article describes how the soil moisture daily diagnostic equation (SMDE) evaluates the relationship between the loss function coefficient and the summation of the weighted average of precipitation. The study has confirmed that using actual solar radiation data in the soil moisture daily diagnostic equation can improve its accuracy.

Article describes how airborne hyperspectral data has high spectral-spatial information, but mining and using this information effectively is still a great challenge. Therefore, a 3D-1D-CNN model was proposed for feature extraction in complex urban with hyperspectral images affected by cloud shadows.

Article describes how environmental air pollution remains a major contributor to negative health outcomes and mortality, but the relationship between socially vulnerable populations and air pollution is not well understood. This paper seeks to understand how air pollution monitor placement strategies and policy may neglect social vulnerabilities and therefore potentially underestimate exposure burdens in vulnerable populations.

Article describes how forests are generally extracted from remotely sensed images based on the spectral features, ignoring other important auxiliary information, and the techniques of precise extraction need to be further improved. By using the Sentinel–2 image and auxiliary factors (AFs) including site conditions (SCs) and vegetation indices (VIs), the random forest model with AFs (RF–AFs) was adopted for the extraction of the economic forests in Lancang County.

Article describes the efficient and accurate identification of canopy gaps is the basis of forest ecosystem research, which is of great significance to further forest monitoring and management. One major limitation of the traditional methods of remote sensing to map canopy gaps is that they cannot finely extract the complex edges of canopy gaps in mountainous areas. The authors proposed an object-oriented classification method that integrates multi-source information.

Authors of the article state that airborne particulate matter (PM) can accumulate on feather surfaces and alter feather appearance, so they quantified PM accumulation on Rock Pigeon feathers and analyzed the spectral properties of extracted particulates. Their findings suggest that wild birds could incur an urban pollution penalty as PM accumulation has the potential to alter feather properties.

Article describes how the low-cost sensor has changed the air quality monitoring paradigm with the capacity for efficient network expansion and community engagement. This study comprehensively assessed ten widely used data techniques, namely AdaBoost, Bayesian ridge, gradient tree boosting, K-nearest neighbors, Lasso, multivariable linear regression, neural network, random forest, ridge regression, and support vector machine.

Article discusses how China implemented the first phase of its National Healthy Cities pilot program from 2016-20. Authors recommend aligning the Healthy Cities initiative in China with strategic national and global level agendas such as Healthy China 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing an integrative governance framework to facilitate a coherent intersectoral program to systemically improve population health.

Article asserts that urban tree canopies are a significant sink for atmospheric elemental carbon (EC)--and air pollutant that is a powerful climate-forcing agent and threat to human health. The authors' findings indicate that complex configurations of roads, buildings, and vegetation produce “urban edge trees” that contribute to heterogeneous EC deposition patterns across urban systems, with implications for greenspace planning.

This article presents a study of urban expansion in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei plain based on ALOS Global Digital Surface Model “ALOS World 3D-30 m” (AW3D30 DSM), Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DSM, and Landsat 7 ETM+ images. The method proposed in this paper can provide rapid and large-scale statistics to study urban construction expansion in the world.

This article is a review examining the effects of forest patches on bees and pollination services to determine how to increase pollination service in agricultural landscapes.

Article exploring the ecology of pollinating bees in urban gardens and farms.

Article presents a study (i) assessing and modeling soil erosion vulnerability based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach in Hoffenthal and KwaMaye communities within the uThukela Catchment, South Africa; and (ii) identifying the relevant sustainable interventions and remedial strategies to combat soil erosion in the study area.

This article identifies the key urban form determinants of decadal-long fine particulate matter (PM2.5) trends in all 626 Chinese cities at the county level and above. As the first study of its kind, this study comprehensively examines the urban form effects on air quality in cities of different population sizes, at different development levels, and in different spatial-autocorrelation positions.

This article employs nighttime light (NTL) information as a proxy indicator of gross domestic product(GDP), and a future land use simulation model (FLUS) to simulate the land use patterns in Guangzhou from 2015 to 2018 and 2018 to 2035 by incorporating planning policies. This study demonstrates that NTL is a suitable and feasible proxy indicator of GDP for the land use simulations, providing a scientific basis for the development of urban planning and construction policy.

Article using National Polar Partnership (NPP)-Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) NTL remote sensing data to observe the seasonal variation of artificial lighting in dragon fruit cropland in Binh Thuan Province, Vietnam. The results suggest that the NTL remotely sensed data could be used to reveal some agricultural productive activities such as dragon fruits production accurately by monitoring the seasonal artificial lighting. This research demonstrates the application potential of NTL remotely sensed data in agriculture.

This article proposes a three-dimensional (3D) vegetation extraction workflow to extract urban grasses and trees at individual tree level in urban areas using airborne LiDAR and hyperspectral data. Results suggest that two- and three-dimensional urban vegetation extraction could play a significant role in spatial layout optimization and scientific management of urban vegetation.

This article presents a comparative study of water indices and image classification algorithms for mapping inland water bodies using Landsat imagery through obtaining 24 high-resolution (≤5 m) and cloud-free images archived in Google Earth with the same (or ±1 day) acquisition dates as the Landsat-8 OLI images over 24 selected lakes across the globe, and developing a method to generate the alternate ground truth data from the Google Earth images for properly evaluating the Landsat image classification results.