Urban areas play a key role in reaching global sustainability as they produce a high amount of waste and emissions, consume a lot of resources, and perform as the prime mover of the global economy. Unsustainable urbanization will generate multidimensional impacts on the earth’s socio-ecological system that is nearly impossible to be managed. As a preemptive action, urban sustainability has been considered as one of the most important targets in the Sustainable Development Goals. Within this context, the green city has emerged as a widely adopted concept around the globe. In the Global North, the concept of a green city has been incrementally developed as efforts to mainstream green infrastructure and nature-based solutions approaches in supporting ecosystem services. Quite the contrary, in the Global South cities, due to their rapid and vast urbanization process, the green city has been fragmentally adopted. Previous studies have proposed three factors, i.e., urbanization, biophysics, and governance, underlying the different approaches of green city development between cities in the Global North and South. Still, more studies are needed to explicate these factors and how these will in turn shape a particular green city trajectory in Global South cities. This study aims to respond to these questions based on green city experimentation in Indonesia. An exploratory study was done based on a literature review and participant observation. The results exhibit that the green city program in Indonesia largely focused on the development of green open spaces which has ultimately failed to improve the urban environment and sustainability. Incorporating local socio-ecological aspects coupled with integrated multi-level and multi-actors’ governance is recommended to increase the green city performances.
Land degradation (LD) is an important issue worldwide because it affects food production and people’s welfare. Many factors cause land degradation, but in humid tropical areas, erosion is the main factor. More than 100 countries including Indonesia are affected by LD. Watershed management should be prioritized owing to budget constraints, while on the other side, the area affected by LD is very large compared to the size of the existing land area. The middle Citarum sub-watershed (MCSW) is one of the most degraded drylands in Indonesia, where the environment can be considered a typical humid tropical watershed. The objective of this study was to map degraded lands and prioritize restoration using a combined approach of the universal soil loss equation (USLE), the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and geographic information systems (GIS) in a multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) environment. The severity of LD was estimated quantitatively by analyzing the parameters of land use and land cover, slope, soil erosion, productivity, and management. The results indicated that the MCSW is dominated by the potentially degraded land classes (38%), followed by the degraded land classes (21%). The prioritization of LD restoration is suggested in the area of very high and high degraded land. The method developed in this research work could be adopted as a tool to guide decision-makers toward sustainable land resource management in humid tropical watersheds affected by LD.