Assessing Impact of Green Infrastructure in Urban Heat Islands

Project Description

The health of millions of people in cities globally is being significantly affected by increasing air temperature. This process, termed the Urban heat island (UHI) effect, is already affecting large numbers of people and could affects billions in the future if forecasted increases in population, urban migration and global warming are all realised. Heatwaves are rapidly increasing in frequency and intensity which is impacting cities around the world. As density and age profile of populations in cities are increasing rapidly the impacts of prolonged periods of extreme heat on heat-related disease, physical and mental illness and heightened death rates, particularly amongst the most vulnerable are also likely to increase. There are also likely additional economic and social costs. There is therefore an urgent requirement for the development of low cost, sustainable methodologies to mitigate the effects of these Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) that can be implemented globally. Green Infrastructure Assets (GIAs) offer a potential effective, low cost strategy for mitigating the effects of UHIs however there is very limited data available relating to the localised performance of GIAs on the urban thermal regime due to the exceptional heterogeneity of urban environments, and the complexity of the interactions between atmospheric processes, urban infrastructure and the GIAs.
This project seeks to initiate the development of a joint research project between internationally leading researchers in the UK and Australia who have expertise in different but highly complimentary research areas which when integrated together will provide the essential skills and experience to produce key new insights into the potentials of GIAs to mitigate the effects of UHIs.
The proposed methodology will seek to utilise a variety of state-of-the-art remote sensing sensors to retrieve a wealth of measurements on the physical and the key environmental variables required to evaluate urban thermal modelling at site-to-landscape scales using ground, UAV, airborne and satellite-based imaging and spectral remote sensing instrumentation. These remote sensing approaches, when supported by suitable ground measurements, have the potential to accurate very accurate, repeat measurements of the key physical parameters and environmental processes over entire cities at the required spatial and temporal resolution to provide new insights into the diurnal and seasonal influences and impacts of heatwaves in the urban environment. These datasets will be used to create digital models that can attempt to replicate the complexity of thermal interactions occurring in the urban environment. The outputs from this project will enable city planners to evaluate the effects of different GIA scenarios providing developers, business and local citizens with quantified benefits of green infrastructure assets in future schemes.