Chronic diseases are now the leading cause of death and disability worldwide; this epidemic has been linked to rapid economic growth and urbanisation in developing countries. Understanding how characteristics of the physical, social, and economic environment affect behaviour in the light of these changes is key to identifying successful interventions to mitigate chronic disease risk.

Climate extremes have profound implications for urban infrastructure and human society, but studies of observed changes in climate extremes over the global urban areas are few, even though more than half of the global population now resides in urban areas. Here, using observed station data for 217 urban areas across the globe, we show that these urban areas have experienced significant increases (p-value <0.05) in the number of heat waves during the period 1973–2012, while the frequency of cold waves has declined.

Water soft paths begin from the vision that future water management has more to gain from reducing demand than from increasing supply. This article reviews three case studies of water soft path analysis in small urban areas in Canada, and one study of an urban planning process incorporating soft path concepts. The analytical studies indicate how communities can avoid the need for expansion of water infrastructure with negligible impacts on lifestyles or livelihoods.

The heritage landscape of Burhanpur has an architectural and horticultural composition, consisting of many historic gardens, a unique water management system, a sustainable planning and design framework, the use of landscape and topography with numerous heritage components and historical monuments, temples, tombs and mosques that are locally, regionally and nationally significant.

ransportation has become an important part of our day to day life. Due to changing lifestyle, frequent travels whether related to work or leisure has become a common phenomenon. Such lifestyle also demands comfortable transport medium and reasonable availability of fuels. As need of vehicle for transportation is rising, it has put pressure of fuel supply, fuel prices and environment as well. The rising prices of fuel, increasing pressure on resources and threatening environment pollution is driving the need for alternative and clean sources of energy.

The effects of urbanization on ozone levels have been widely investigated over cities primarily located in temperate and/or humid regions. In this study, nested WRF-Chem simulations with a finest grid resolution of 1 km are conducted to investigate ozone concentrations [O3] due to urbanization within cities in arid/semi-arid environments. First, a method based on a shape preserving Monotonic Cubic Interpolation (MCI) is developed and used to downscale anthropogenic emissions from the 4 km resolution 2005 National Emissions Inventory (NEI05) to the finest model resolution of 1 km.