Is Urban Greening an Effective Solution to Enhance Environmental Comfort and Improve Air Quality?

Abstract

Urban greening has often been proposed as a cost-effective solution to improve environmental comfort, but may also deteriorate air quality. Quantifying these two opposing effects of urban greening is necessary to develop successful environmental policies for specific mega-city clusters. In this study, a high-resolution regional climate and air quality model (WRF-Chem, v4.0.3) was employed to test three scenarios aimed at quantifying the impact of land-use change and biogenic emissions from urban greening on regional climate and air quality. It was found that urban greening could effectively decrease the near-surface temperature by up to 0.45 °C, but the increased biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions offset some of this cooling effect (by up to 65%). Land-use change due to urban greening dominated the improvement in human comfort but worsened diffusion conditions to result in the convergence of fine particulate matter in specific areas. The selection of low-emission tree species may be imperative, although increased emissions from urban greening will not change the sensitivity of ozone to precursors under the current scenario of anthropogenic emissions. This is because BVOC emissions due to urban greening will become a more important source of pollution with the development of clean energy and the popularity of low-carbon lifestyles.