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Extensive measurements of the emissions of methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia from wastewater treatment facilities in the USA present higher values than are currently stated in national inventories. The results of this analysis show that greenhouse gas and nitrogenous emissions from the wastewater sector are often overlooked and that their impact on climate should be reassessed.

Media informs how we see our cities and ourselves. Using news headlines, this study reveals how the press coverage of Egypt’s New Administrative Capital City project reinforced a vision of urban growth that echoed commercial aspirations.

French planning decisions systematically locate Traveller sites near environmental disamenities. This study reveals disproportionate exposure to waste facilities and highways compared to other residential areas.

Urbanization disrupts oak tree microbiomes by reducing beneficial fungi and increasing plant and human pathogens across leaves, roots and soils, with consequences for tree health, urban climate mitigation and potential human exposure to pathogens.

Mepolizumab (anti-IL-5 therapy) has been shown to reduce type 2 inflammation in asthma. Here the authors use bulk transcriptomics from nasal samples before and after mepolizumab treatment to assess the changes and associations with treatment outcomes.

Green roofs enhance urban ecosystem services, but the long-term vegetation health and design’s impact is underexplored. This study shows a temporal increase in vegetation health and identifies key factors and thresholds that support sustained vegetation health, offering guidance for effective green roof planning and design.

The soils of urban greenspaces are strikingly rich. This study finds that the variety of microbial life there is linked to acidic conditions and that this diversity is more homogenous than found in farmland soils.

Analyses of the nationally representative Indian Council of Medical Research–India Diabetes survey reported that Indian diets are characterized by high intakes of low-quality carbohydrates associated with 14–30% higher cardiometabolic risk, which can be reduced by substituting carbohydrates with protein.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cities serve as climate change laboratories for phenology studies. Here, the authors show that results of such studies should be interpreted with caution, as urban-rural phenology gaps are primarily driven by species composition differences rather than temperature differences.

A new network approach maps every street block in sub-Saharan Africa using high-resolution building and street data, pinpointing infrastructure needs and revealing development gradients from neighbourhoods to cities and rural areas.

This study maps individual trees across 54 African cities to examine the relationship between tree cover and urban informality. The findings highlight a shortage of green infrastructure in informal settlements and the need for data-driven strategies to integrate trees into future urban development.

Pathogenic fungi, such as Candida, cause millions of human deaths each year. This study found that the soil in urban greenspaces is one source and that socioeconomic factors, such as wealth and medical infrastructure, can predict the diversity and composition of these pathogens in city park soil.

Escherichia coli-contaminated stored drinking water facilitates strain-sharing between household members, suggesting water treatment can curb bacterial transmission and antibiotic resistance in urban low-income communities.

A 1.5-fold gap exists in green space cooling adaptation between cities in the Global South and North. Enhancing urban green space quality and quantity offers vast potential for improving outdoor cooling adaptation and reducing its global inequality.

The authors discuss the challenges of curbing land take and the complexity of achieving the net-zero limit. They call for a shift in perspective beyond the restrictive logic of traditional land-use planning and suggest that the regenerative potential of cities be unleashed.

Analysis of soundscape data from 139 globally distributed sites reveals that sounds of biological origin exhibit predictable rhythms depending on location and season, whereas sounds of anthropogenic origin are less predictable. Comparisons between paired urban–rural sites show that urban green spaces are noisier and dominated by sounds of technological origin.

Brazil is known to supply an important share of China’s increasing demand for proteins, but the exact pressure on land and water that results from this is unclear. This study addresses this gap, focusing on soybean trade, showing the persistence of indirect deforestation associated with soy cultivation expansion.

This study reports widespread loss of mountain vegetation worldwide from 2000 to 2020, with ∼89% attributable to human expansion, primarily agriculture. Over half of this loss occurred within protected areas and other biodiversity-rich areas, threatening conservation efforts.

Access to green space has been a critical, and contentious, issue for neighbourhood inequality and health outcomes. This Analysis looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic interacts with availability of nature for urban residents.

Urban regions are growing rapidly worldwide, threatening surrounding habitats, including in drylands. This study finds that indirect impacts to surrounding drylands are more than ten times greater than direct impacts and that such impacted areas contain almost 60% of threatened species globally.

This study used multiplex serology to monitor multiple diseases simultaneously from a single serosurvey. Seroprevalence estimates were performed for five disease categories in Zambezia Province, Mozambique.

Analyses of data from the UK Biobank reveal different urban living environments that are associated with affective, anxiety and emotional instability symptom groups and mediated by distinct neurological and genetic pathways in adults.

Treatment-seeking for fever is widely used to estimate treatment of childhood infections, but cross-country comparisons are problematic. Here, the authors estimate the probability of seeking treatment for fever at public facilities across 29 countries by quantifying person-level latent variables.

Cities affect biological evolution, but traditionally researchers focus on the biophysical influence of urban environments. Instead, this Review explores how the social processes of religion, politics and war drive wildlife evolution by shaping urban conditions.

Environmental drivers of soil carbon and its sensitivity to warming are poorly understood. The authors compare soil samples of paired urban and natural ecosystems and show that under warming, the microbiome is an essential driver of soil carbon in urban greenspace compared with natural ecosystems.

Urban expansion and climate change interact to produce less night-time warming than their sum. Combined implementation of adaptation strategies can offset projected daytime urban warming when applied with GHG emissions reductions, but cannot offset projected nocturnal warming.

Liu et al. demonstrate that human-driven soil contamination in natural areas mirrors that in nearby urban greenspaces globally, and highlight the potential influence that soil contaminants have on ecosystem functions.

In a previous study, the authors developed a next-generation sequencing-based method for tracking SARS-CoV-2 infection dynamics. Here, they describe integration of this technology into a clinical pipeline and use it to describe the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 variants in Toronto, Canada from 2020 to 2023.

According to Zipf’s law, the population size of a city is inversely proportional to its size rank in any urban system. The authors show how demography explains this law as a time average of balanced migration between cities and how deviations express information about people’s net preferences.

Short-lived halogens have a substantial indirect cooling effect on climate and this cooling effect has increased since pre-industrial times owing to anthropogenic amplification of natural halogen emissions.

Addressing interdependencies between urban buildings and the urban environment for urban heat mitigation and energy conservation, this study models eight heat mitigation scenarios for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. These heat mitigation scenarios use super-cool photonic materials combined with properly designed green infrastructure to lower peak temperatures by up to 4.5 °C, reduce cooling demand by up to 35%, and contribute to cooling energy conservation by up to 16%.

This study projects a significant increase in the frequency and duration of compound dry-hot extreme (CDHE) events in major U.S. cities during the 21st century. GHG-induced warming is the main driver, amplified by urban development.

This study reveals major grocery access disparities across US cities. Strategic placement of ≤5 stores could create 15-minute walking access in 25% of cities, while ambitious 5-minute targets would require over 100 new stores in most locations.

Understanding the impact of future climate variations and urban densification is key to planning renewable energy integration. By developing a multi-scale spatio-temporal modelling framework, Perera et al. reveal changes in wind speed and temperature across European cities.

Cities are renowned for catalyzing human interactions, but their effects on urban species are less clear. This Perspective argues for such a focus, and proposes a framework for studying interactions between urban species.

Urban greening can help to mitigate both heat as well as flooding risks, but how these effects interact is not well known. Here, the authors provide a global analysis and show that most cities benefit from one of these two effects, but only few from both.

Climate conditions and urbanization can be major drivers of vector-borne infections. Here the authors demonstrate that an often-neglected climate variable, humidity, is an important factor for malaria epidemics in two urban areas in India.

Analysing phenotypic and genomic differences between urban and rural lizards, the authors identify a single non-synonymous polymorphism associated with heat tolerance plasticity that may explain how urban lizards can endure higher temperatures compared to those in forests.

Seagrass ecosystems often co-occur with urbanized coastal regions, providing important filtration services that reduce human bacterial pathogens from coastal sources. This study examines whether such filtration function is transferred to food fish such as marine bivalves, and its global applicability.

The authors show how city design and climate both influence the release of chemicals to the world, and suggest that we can help reduce impacts on people and ecosystems by reducing emissions and using green space to trap and degrade chemicals.

In a widespread sampling campaign across urban soils, the authors find that soil biodiversity, but not plant diversity, is positively related to multiple ecosystem functions in urban environments.