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Unearthing the role of soils in urban climate resilience planning

Urban soils are often overlooked in climate resilience planning and policy. We advocate for a broader framing of urban soils within an equity-centred social ecological framework that acknowledges the role of soils as essential infrastructure and enhances investment to maximize their benefits towards resilient urban futures.

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Fig. 1: A framework for supporting climate resilience through soil.

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Acknowledgements

We extend gratitude to S. Chin for comments on an earlier draft. Funding was provided to D.L.H. by a grant from Accelerate Resilience L.A. (ARLA), a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Support for K.S. was provided by the National Science Foundation. E.M.C. acknowledges support by NSF grants 1934933 and 1927167. M.S., M.N. and M.R. received no financial support.

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We used a modified version of the process presented in ref. 15 to determine author order. M.S., M.N., M.R., E.M.C., D.L.H. and K.S. contributed extensively to the preparation of this Comment article. K.S. and M.S. proposed the initial research. All authors conducted a preliminary scan of US-based resilience plans to assess the presence and framing of urban soils. M.S., M.N. and K.S. drafted the initial Comment. All authors contributed to subsequent edits and the preparation of the final manuscript for submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kirsten Schwarz.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Erik Andersson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Shankar, M., Ng, M., Rogers, M. et al. Unearthing the role of soils in urban climate resilience planning. Nat Sustain 7, 1374–1376 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01436-1

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