Enhancement Pathways for Urban Water Ecological Resilience

Enhancing urban water ecological resilience (UWER) is increasingly essential as climate change, rapid urbanization, and ecological degradation intensify pressures on urban aquatic systems. However, knowledge of the mechanisms required to systematically enhance UWER remains fragmented across the ecological, technological, and governance domains. This narrative review synthesizes the current understanding of UWER by examining its conceptual foundations, key drivers, mechanisms, and enhancement pathways. Grounded in ecological resilience theory, UWER is the capacity of urban aquatic ecosystems, shaped by supporting infrastructure and governance arrangements, to resist disturbances, recover essential functions, and adapt or transform under persistent change. The Social–Ecological–Technological Systems and Three Horizons frameworks are integrated to connect these capacities with cross-system interventions and longer-term transitions. Hydroclimatic forcing, land-use intensity, ecological integrity, and institutional capacity emerge as recurrent and interacting UWER drivers, with their effects operating across scales and potentially generating nonlinear feedback, threshold behavior, and regime shifts. Three complementary enhancement pathways are identified: technological pathways, including nature-based, hybrid and decentralized infrastructure and digital tools; ecological pathways focused on biodiversity, habitat complexity, and connectivity; and governance and institutional pathways based on integrated planning, stable financing, participation, and adaptive policies. These pathways become most effective when coordinated as an integrated social–ecological–technological transition rather than implemented as isolated measures. Nevertheless, a persistent definition-to-decision gap remains because of inconsistent concepts, fragmented indicators, limited long-term observations, and the weak translation of assessments into practice. Future progress requires measurable resilience targets, validated indicators, sustained monitoring, context-sensitive coordination of ecological restoration, infrastructure innovation, and adaptive governance.