The physical and financial effects of climate change on housing are simultaneously reshaping financial markets and urban policy and practice. In this roundtable discussion, Savannah Cox interviews five experts working on housing, climate adaptation, and finance in a wide range of urban contexts: Zac Taylor, Isabelle Anguelovski, Alex Fella, Zachary Lamb, and Linda Shi. Participants illuminate how these domains collide in multiple and complex ways in the frontline communities where they do research and capacity-building. Physical climate risks like flooding or heat stress, housing characteristics like tenure, property and land regimes, as well as public and market-led planning and finance approaches collectively shape local housing and adaptation trajectories. This complexity calls for more than simply scaling up the volumes of capital to address housing adaptation finance “gaps” in citie—as commonly advocated for by urban climate policymakers. Even well intentioned and proactive investment approaches can lead to unequal outcomes like climate gentrification. Urban policymakers, financial institutions, civic groups, and other stakeholders must build local capacity to understand and address these dynamics. Climate risk assessment tools, technical support, ownership structures, and other interventions offer potential routes to foster agency and mobilize resources to balance housing and climate goals in cities.

Goals and pathways to achieve sustainable urban development have multiple interlinkages with human health and wellbeing. However, these interlinkages have not been examined in depth in recent discussions on urban sustainability and global urban science. This paper fills that gap by elaborating in detail the multiple links between urban sustainability and human health and by mapping research gaps at the interface of health and urban sustainability sciences. As researchers from a broad range of disciplines, we aimed to: 1) define the process of urbanization, highlighting distinctions from related concepts to support improved conceptual rigour in health research; 2) review the evidence linking health with urbanization, urbanicity, and cities and identify cross-cutting issues; and 3) highlight new research approaches needed to study complex urban systems and their links with health. This novel, comprehensive knowledge synthesis addresses issue of interest across multiple disciplines. Our review of concepts of urban development should be of particular value to researchers and practitioners in the health sciences, while our review of the links between urban environments and health should be of particular interest to those outside of public health. We identify specific actions to promote health through sustainable urban development that leaves no one behind, including: integrated planning; evidence-informed policy-making; and monitoring the implementation of policies. We also highlight the critical role of effective governance and equity-driven planning in progress towards sustainable, healthy, and just urban development.