Urban Ecology & the Hopeful Path to Resilient Cities - IEEE SusTech 2026

As climate chaos accelerates, populations continue to increase, food supplies and distribution are challenged, and providing for urban residents and landscapes is an unprecedented task. My goal is to help the audience think about resilience as an enhanced alternative to sustainability.

One of the great challenges we have in our current mode of thinking is that we use the terms restoration and sustainability. Both of those ideas hold in place that there is some final point that we can bring our landscapes to that will keep them healthy in perpetuity. While the goal is laudable, that interpretation fails to account for the dynamic nature of ecosystems. As climate chaos accelerates, populations continue to increase, and food supplies and distribution are challenged, we face an unprecedented task: providing for the well-being of our urban residents and the landscapes in which they live. Using resilience as a frame, the model suggests we can continuously shift the paradigm to adapt to the needs of changing cities, while maintaining the critical ecosystem services required.