Earth currently transitions from a mostly rural to a mostly urban planet; from 2000 until 2030 the urbanized areas will nearly triple (Seto et al. 2012). The use of dark building materials, such as asphalt and concrete, leads to a lower albedo in urbanized areas than in natural environment (Rosenzweig et al. 2011), fostering local and global warming. In turn, the increase in urban albedo might support climate stabilization efforts (REF). Here we investigate the potential effect of the increase in albedo in a representative set of European cities relying on three metrics: a) instantaneous radiative forcing; b) urban cooling; c) reduction in mortality. We find a distinct but surprising geographical variation of the radiative forcing potential. Central European cities can as effectively change radiative forcing as Southern European cities, reflecting their sometimes relatively larger urban area. However, the more local metrics of urban cooling and especially the resulting health impact display the highest benefits of albedo modifications in Southern European cities, emphasizing the need for a geographically stratified albedo policies to maximize benefits.
Mitigating and adapting to climate change is one of the grand challenges of our times (GEA 2012). As on international level progress in addressing climate change remains stuck in complicated negotiations (Edenhofer et al. 2013), cities might be the appropriate spatial scale to address multi-faceted challenges such as climate change (Barber, 2013). Albeit cities’ decision makers reluctantly react to top-down imposed mitigation and adaptation plans (Reckien et al. 2014), they successfully implement local measures pursuing co-benefits and cost-savings deriving by climate change mitig...
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...al cycles, 15 (4), 891 – 907 (2001)
30. Santamouris, M., Cooling the cities – A review of reflective and green roof mitigation technologies to fight heat island and improve comfort in urban environments. Solar Energy, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2012.07.003 (2012)
31. Jacobson, M. Z., Ten Hoeve, J., E., Effects of urban surfaces and white roofs on global and regional climate, Journal of Climate, 25, 1028 – 1044 (2012)
32. Georgescu, M., Marefield, P.E., Bierwagen, B.G., Weaver, C.P., Urban adaptation can roll back warming of emerging megapolitan regions, PNAS (2014)
33. Baccini, M., Biggeri, A., Accetta, G., Kosatsky, T., Katsouyanni, K., Analitis, A., Anderson, H., R., Bisanti, L., D´Ippoliti, D., Danova, J., Forsberg, B., Medina, S., Paldy, A., Rabczenko, D., Schindler, C., Michelozzi, P., Heat effects on mortality in 15 European cites, Epidemiology (2008)
Finally in 1991, the federal government initiated a ‘Better Cities Program’ which aimed to make Australian cities sustainable and more liveable. It encoura...
Hoffman, M. (2013) “Global Climate Change” in The Handbook of Global Climate and Environmental Policy
It is becoming increasingly certain that climate change will have severe adverse effects on the environment in years to come. Addressing this issue poses a serious challenge for policy makers. How we choose to respond to the threat of global warming is not simply a political issue. It is also an economic issue and an ethical one. Responsible, effective climate change policy requires consideration of a number of complex factors, including weighing the costs of implementing climate change policies against the benefits of more environmentally sustainable practices.
The philosophical orientation underpinning this proposal study is pragmatic paradigms. Given the apparent impacts of climate change, a cost benefit analysis monetizes input variables so that planners can systematically rank available alternative interventions. This model is scalable and can contextualize the unique needs and available resources of each city to generate relevant results. A cost benefit analysis can be adapted to deal with uncertainty, which is crucial as the causes and impacts of climate change are still being studied. For over one hundred years, this assessment model has been used by all levels of governments around the world to allocate public resources, demonstrating the usefulness of this pragmatic tool in action-based decision making.
There is no longer any question that our world climate has changed (King, 2004). Over the last 100 years, "temperatures have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius and global sea level has risen by about 20cm" (K...
...ts and roofs absorb sun’s energy, thus heating up the surface of an urban city, intensifying the UHI. The Berkeley Heat Island Team concluded that lighter asphalts, or ‘cool pavements’, reflected as much as 30 to 50 percent of sun light, which is significantly higher than 5 percent of new asphalt, and 10 to 20 percent of aged asphalt, and ‘cool roofs’ decrease temperature inside and outside the building. Such ‘Cool technologies’ also seem applicable to Seoul, in renewal and development of infrastructure continues. Government schemes to reduce energy consumption, initiate plans to raise efficiency of special areas, limit cars driving, encourage riding bicycles, create urban forests and gardens, rooftop greenery, and more. There are also methods of planning routes for wind, Blue Way, by planning infrastructures, to let wind swiftly flow in to decrease the heat.
Siegel, RP. "Solar Thermal: Pros and Cons - Part 1: Solar Heating and Cooling." Triple Pundit RSS. N.p., 21 May 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2014. .
The nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan revealed the fragility of highly centralised energy systems that are not adapted into complex societies. Some technological solutions such as carbon dioxide capture or shale gas could even turn out to be mere illusions in the future. Meanwhile, energy costs are increasing every day, with social consequences. As a result, there have been calls for strong involvement of local authorities in formulating energy policies for cities. This will give rise to a more prominent place to decentralise policies on the basis of energy efficiency, energy savings as well the use of renewable energy. It is widely anticipated that the implementation of these policies by the relevant city authorities will play a prominent role in the transition to energy efficient cities (Energy-cities, 2011).
Nowadays, more than half of the world population lives in cities. Urban populations consume 75% of the world 's natural resources and generate 75% of waste. Cities have become consumers of enormous amounts of natural resources and generating massive environmental
Surely there exist cities that are determined to transform into more eco-friendly representatives of urban civilization, yet these efforts are typically focused on minimizing the harmful output of cities rather than rew...
In addition to being incapable of providing a suitable environment, urban transition negatively impacts the climate.
Hardy, J. T. Climate Change: Causes, Effects, and Solutions. New York: J. Wiley, 2003. Print.
It has taken 20 to 30 years, based on images taken in space of the Earth during the late 1960s, for people to realize that the environment ‘is like a bathtub of limited capacity’. Cities have been developing based on human culture whilst trying to be sustainable at the same time. Although it may be sustainable, the production process and the energy producing systems where they burn fossil fuels, contributes to the amount of carbon emissions that we produce each day. Green city is an expression for eco-city which is a city built off the principles of living within the means of the environment. It has been perceived as a concept rather than it circumstantially solving an ecological collapse like the ‘green Disneyland’ in Masdar City described
The earth is a complex system, which continues to evolve and change. Climate change and global warming are currently popular in the political agenda. But what does “climate” really mean? The difference between weather and climate can be conveyed in a single sentence: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.” Based on research of the geologic record, we know that climate change has happened throughout Earth's history and at present, ever-increasing evidence points to the roles that humans play in altering Earth systems. The Earth and its atmosphere receive heat energy from the sun; the atmospheric heat budget of the Earth depends on the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation from the planet; which has been constant over the last few thousand years. However present evidence seems to suggest that the recent increase in temperature has been brought about by pollution of the atmosphere, in particular the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide, mostly through Anthropogenic Forcing (human activity) and other various internal and external factors. I...
This happens because the urban surface materials gain the heat from the solar during the day under clear sky and release those heat during night. In this paper, we have identified several significant factors that contribute to the formation of urban heat islands based on different research. Those factors are colour and type of materials used for pavement and roofs, lack of evapotranspiration, geometric effects of buildings, and waste heat generated by energy usage. A study by Mohajerani, Bakaric, and Jeffrey-Bailey (2017) in Australia showed that.