Is it more important to take measures to stabilize climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to take measures to strengthen the resilience of society, the ecosystem and infrastructure with regards to the effects that climate change already has? The answer to these questions seems to be simple, because there is no doubt that enormous and rapid efforts are needed in both interrelated fields to avert dramatic damage and high costs to our economy and to the global population.
While a portfolio of measures to reduce greenhouse gases has been in place for decades, measures to prevent or reduce the negative effects of climate change are currently not very widespread and their benefit is still difficult to quantify. For this reason, in the current issue of “sustainable technologies”, we focus on the important and challenging topic of urban heat islands due to climate change and report on promising developments with regards to greening of buildings, development of technologies and digital tools in this field as well as exemplary implementations with regards to the adaption of buildings and cities to the climate change effects.