Abstract
Urban green infrastructure, especially trees, are widely regarded as one of the most effective ways to reduce urban temperatures in heatwaves and alleviate the adverse impacts of extreme heat events on human health and well-being. Nevertheless, urban planners and decision-makers are still lacking methods and tools to spatially evaluate the cooling effects of urban green spaces and exploit them to assess greening strategies at the urban agglomeration scale. This article introduces a novel spatially explicit approach to simulate urban greening scenarios by increasing the tree canopy cover in the existing urban fabric and evaluating their heat mitigation potential. The latter is achieved by applying the InVEST urban cooling model to the synthetic land use/land cover maps generated for the greening scenarios. A case study in the urban agglomeration of Lausanne, Switzerland, illustrates the development of tree canopy scenarios following distinct spatial distribution strategies. The spatial pattern of the tree canopy strongly influences the human exposure to the highest temperatures, and small increases in the abundance of tree canopy cover with the appropriate spatial configuration can have major impacts on human health and well-being. The proposed approach supports urban planning and the design of nature-based solutions to enhance climate resilience.
Highlights
Urbanization is a global phenomenon that increasingly concentrates the world’s population in urban areas, with the latter expected to grow in both the number of dwellers and spatial extent over the decades [1,2,3]
In order to evaluate the human exposure to urban heat island (UHI), the population data for the study area has been extracted from the population and households statistics (STATPOP) [42] provided at a 100 m resolution by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (SFSO) with the Python library swisslandstats-geopy [43]
The largest differences between sampling approaches can be noted in the number of transformed pixels that originally belong to the ‘garden’ class
Summary
Urbanization is a global phenomenon that increasingly concentrates the world’s population in urban areas, with the latter expected to grow in both the number of dwellers and spatial extent over the decades [1,2,3]. As a major force of landscape change, urbanization is characterized by the conversion of natural to artificial surfaces, which alters the energy and water exchanges as well as the movement of air. Such changes often result in the urban heat island (UHI) effect, a phenomenon by which urban temperatures are warmer than its rural surroundings [4,5,6,7,8,9]. The way in which cities can plan and optimize their green infrastructure to reduce heat stress is not yet sufficiently understood, largely because of the lack of fine-grained approaches to evaluate the cooling effects of the spatial pattern of the tree canopy at the urban agglomeration scale
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