Water-heat-carbon nexus for understanding mechanisms and response thresholds across urbanization gradients

Abstract

Urbanization significantly affects the balance of key elements such as water, heat, and carbon in cities. However, previous studies have not integrated these factors for comprehensive analysis. Here, we proposed a water-heat-carbon (WHC) nexus model to provide a holistic understanding of urbanization’s impacts. Furthermore, we employed the model to identify the mechanisms and response thresholds of urbanization through this coupling approach. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) WHC exhibits a nonlinear, inverted S-shaped response to urbanization. (2) The mechanisms through which urbanization impacts WHC differ significantly across urbanization gradients. Acrossing urbanization gradients, the complexity of impact pathways increases, with direct effects becoming more pronounced and positive impact pathways emerging progressively. (3) We identified priority zones for restoration and protection based on the likelihood of units shifting between lower-risk and higher-risk categories. Our study enhances understanding of the WHC-urbanization nexus and highlights the importance of accounting for threshold effects and environmental interactions when examining the impact between urbanization and WHC. This framework can be adapted to other urban areas experiencing similar challenges.

Keywords

Water-heat-carbon nexus / Non-linear response / Influence mechanism / Priority management areas / Urbanization

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Kaiping Wang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Chenxing Wang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Resources, Funding acquisition. Jingran Gao: Visualization, Methodology, Data curation. Yimei Chen: Writing – original draft, Visualization. Hanqi Tang: Visualization, Validation. Yunlu Zhang: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Zhaowu Yu: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (Grant No. 2023132050); National Forestry and Grassland Administration (Grant No. 2019132703); National Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42171093, 42101250); Fengyun 3 Satellite Ground Application Project (Grants No. FY-2(03)-AS-12.09-ZT, FY-APP-2021.0407).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100283.

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