Bangladesh is urbanizing at a pace few countries have experienced. Cities are expanding faster than the institutions meant to manage water, sanitation, waste, and climate risks. As researchers working closely with urban communities and local governments, we repeatedly encountered a simple but uncomfortable question: How sustainable are our cities really, and how can we compare them in a way that helps policy and planning? Existing assessments often relied on national averages or sector-by-sector indicators, which obscured sharp inequalities within and across cities. This gap motivated our study.
Our paper develops and applies an SDG-aligned composite framework to assess urban environmental sustainability in four major city corporations of Bangladesh, Rajshahi, Gazipur, Sylhet, and Barishal. By focusing on SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and SDG 13 (Climate Action), we aimed to capture the environmental backbone of urban sustainability while explicitly recognizing the interlinkages among water, infrastructure, and climate resilience.
Building an index that reflects lived urban realities
A core contribution of this study is methodological. Rather than relying solely on secondary statistics, we combined official data with a primary household survey of 1,200 respondents across the four cities. This allowed us to capture not only infrastructure coverage but also service reliability, environmental perceptions, and climate risk experiences at the household level.
Using standardized normalization, principal component analysis, and aggregation techniques, we constructed a Composite Sustainability Index that integrates indicators across the three SDGs. Importantly, this approach does not treat the goals as isolated silos. Instead, it operationalizes the SDG nexus, recognizing that improvements in waste management, for example, can enhance water quality and reduce climate-related vulnerabilities.
What we found: moderate progress, unevenly distributed
Our results show that overall urban environmental sustainability in Bangladesh’s cities remains moderate. Among the four city corporations, Rajshahi emerged as the strongest performer, while Gazipur, despite being one of the country’s fastest-growing industrial hubs, ranked lowest. Sylhet and Barishal occupied intermediate positions, each with distinctive strengths and vulnerabilities.
Across all cities, SDG 6 indicators generally performed better than those related to SDG 11 and SDG 13. Access to water and sanitation has expanded, but service quality, equity, and long-term safety remain uneven. Performance on climate action was the weakest and most variable, revealing significant gaps in adaptation planning, renewable energy adoption, and institutional preparedness.
One of the most striking findings is the strength of interlinkages among the SDGs. Water and sanitation outcomes were strongly correlated with urban infrastructure and service quality, while climate resilience was closely tied to how well cities managed waste, drainage, and public services. These patterns confirm that sustainability gains in cities are rarely achieved through single-sector interventions.
Inequality matters, socially and spatially
Beyond city-level comparisons, our analysis highlights deep social and spatial inequalities. Higher-income and better-educated households consistently scored higher on the composite sustainability index, reflecting better access to services and greater adaptive capacity. Female-headed households showed relatively stronger outcomes in water and sanitation, likely reflecting targeted WASH initiatives, but lagged in climate-related dimensions, pointing to persistent barriers in access to finance, energy technologies, and decision-making spaces.
These findings reinforce a critical message: urban sustainability is not only an environmental or technical challenge; it is also a question of equity, governance, and inclusion.
Why this research matters
This study contributes to urban sustainability research in three key ways. First, it offers a replicable, SDG-aligned framework that can be used by policymakers and researchers to monitor sustainability at the city level in data-constrained contexts. Second, it provides empirical evidence of the SDG nexus in action, demonstrating that fragmented governance undermines sustainability outcomes. Third, it generates city-specific insights that can inform targeted policy responses rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.
For Bangladesh, and other rapidly urbanizing countries, the implication is clear: achieving the 2030 Agenda will depend on strengthening integrated urban governance, investing in climate adaptation alongside basic services, and addressing the social inequalities that shape environmental outcomes. We hope this work supports more evidence-based, locally grounded pathways toward sustainable and resilient cities.
— Imran Hossain and co-authors
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Spatio-temporal Big Data: Enabling Urban Land Use and Climate Change for Sustainability
With the acceleration of global urbanization and the intensification of climate change, cities are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Urban land use patterns not only directly affect the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of cities but also determine their adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. Meanwhile, extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and sea-level rise brought about by climate change pose higher demands on urban land use and infrastructure. Therefore, how to address climate change through optimized land use and enhanced urban resilience has become a key issue for urban sustainable development.
In recent years, the rapid development of spatio-temporal big data technology has provided new ideas and tools for solving this complex problem. Spatio-temporal big data, encompassing various data sources such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile data, offers high-resolution and multi-dimensional spatio-temporal information. These data not only enable more precise monitoring and analysis of urban land use changes but also reveal the mechanisms by which climate change impacts urban systems. Moreover, combined with advanced analytical techniques such as machine learning, deep learning, and statistical modeling, spatio-temporal big data can provide scientific evidence for urban planning, policy-making, and resource management, thereby facilitating the achievement of urban sustainable development goals.
This collection aims to gather cutting-edge research findings on the application of spatio-temporal big data in urban land use and climate change, exploring how data-driven approaches can optimize urban land use, enhance urban resilience, and promote urban sustainable development. We welcome researchers from multidisciplinary fields such as geographical sciences, urban planning, environmental science, climate science, and data science to submit original research papers, review articles, and case studies to jointly advance the theoretical and practical development of this interdisciplinary field.
The research collected in this series includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:
1. Application of Spatio-temporal Big Data in Urban Land Use Monitoring and Assessment
- Land use change analysis based on remote sensing and GIS
- Modeling urban expansion and land cover changes using spatio-temporal big data
- Assessing and optimizing urban land use efficiency
2. Impact of Climate Change on Urban Land Use
- Impacts of extreme weather events on urban land use and corresponding responses
- Relationship between urban heat island effects and land use under climate change
- Effects of sea-level rise on land use in coastal cities and adaptation strategies
3. Application of Spatio-temporal Big Data in Urban Climate Resilience
- Urban flood risk assessment and management using spatio-temporal big data
- The role of urban ecosystem services in climate change adaptation
- Assessing and enhancing urban infrastructure resilience to climate change
4. Spatio-temporal Big Data and Urban Sustainable Development Planning
- Developing urban sustainability indicators using spatio-temporal big data
- Climate change adaptation in urban land use planning
- Synergistic optimization of urban transportation, energy, and land use
5. Interdisciplinary Research on Spatio-temporal Big Data
- Economic analysis of urban land use and climate change
- Social equity perspectives on urban land use and climate adaptation
- Spatio-temporal big data analysis of urban health and well-being
Keywords:Spatio-temporal Big Data; Urban Land Use; Climate Change; Urban Planning; Sustainable Development; Urban Economics; Machine Learning; Carbon Emissions; Ecosystem Services; Urban Resilience, Smart Cities
Publishing Model: Open Access
Deadline: Dec 30, 2026
Cities, Infrastructure and Health
City infrastructure shapes health and health inequities in myriad interdependent ways: cities are drivers of economic policy and employment; they are sites of excellence, for example, education and healthcare, but also of crime and exploitation. Mobility within and between cities and regions is critical for economic development but is also responsible for air pollution, chronic disease, and road traffic injuries. The voracious demands of urban populations for housing, energy, food, and other resources bind cities to their peri-urban and rural neighbors, and across the world environmentally, economically, and socially. These and other examples shape physical health, mental well-being, safety, and equity.
While infrastructure is defined as the undergirding of society, the costs and benefits of revitalizing old or creating new infrastructure tend to narrowly focus on economics rather than how cities and regions function and grow. The climate crisis is placing massive pressure on existing and new infrastructure to both mitigate and adapt to a newer more volatile world. The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly tested (as will future pandemics) the function and capacity of city infrastructure globally through connecting infrastructure (especially transport but also the flow of finance) and locally where critical infrastructure services and their workforce were both the cause and solution to the spread of the pandemic.
The percentage of the global urban population is growing steadily and by 2050 is expected to reach 68%, meaning scholarship to drive decision-making, politics, and policy is urgent. Taking a health lens to infrastructure provides an ever deeper understanding of the links between cities as producers of healthy societies and a healthy planet. Influencing city infrastructure to protect and promote the health of the public is wholly political, but the research into the systemic policy and practice connections between city infrastructure and the creation of healthy built environments remains underdeveloped.
This Collection invites papers that capture innovations in city infrastructure policies and practices. The innovations can range from ways that information is collected and used, to activities to develop capacity and share knowledge within and between cities, to the interrogation of policy-making and political institutions. Given the ubiquitous interconnected nature of this challenge, we encourage papers with a global south lens. Given city and infrastructure policy and practice is essentially transdisciplinary we encourage papers that span disciplines. We aim for a collection of papers that foster policy innovation by providing a mix of empirical rigour and critical depth.
Keywords:Cities, Infrastructure, Practice, Policy, Health, Equity, Wellbeing, Urban, Planning, Institutions, Governance, Power, Evidence
Publishing Model: Open Access
Deadline: Jun 30, 2026
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