How does Urbanization affect Climate Change?
The urbanization-induced land cover changes affect the regional climate by altering the surface-atmosphere interactions, and the urbanization-induced life-style changes affect the global climate by increasing fossil energy consumption. However, the impacts of urbanization on climate across scales are not constant. Instead, there is a large variation in urbanization’s climate impacts, which depend on factors like background climates, and spatial organizations of land-uses and human activities. By exploring different possible urban and climate futures, the lab of CLimate & Urban Environments (CLUEs) provides the knowledge (clues) needed to minimize the cross-scale climate impacts in future cities.
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Where and how will urban areas expand?
The environmental impacts of urban land expansion and the effects of climate change on cities all depend on geographical locations. It is important to understand where and how urban areas will expand to accommodate the billions of new urban population in the 21st century. By developing urbanization scenarios, we will explore the full range of possible urban climate outcomes and the interventions needed to achieve the more desirable outcomes (Huang et al. 2019 ERL; Huang et al. 2021 Urban Climate).
What are the impacts of urbanization and climate change on environmental hazards?
Urbanization and climate change can cause similar environmental hazards via different mechanisms. Climate change leads to more frequent and severer heatwaves, floods, droughts, and wildfires; while urbanization worsens these hazards with stronger urban heat island effect and surface runoff, as well as higher water demand and larger wildland-urban interface (Huang et al. 2019 ERL; Huang et al. 2021 JGR). There is a knowledge gap regarding how climate change and urbanization interact, synergistically or counteractively, in intensifying the severity of—and the exposure to—environmental hazards (Atmosphere SI).
What are the constraints on urban climate adaptation?
Urban adaptations to heat—installing indoor cooling, lowering urban density, increasing green space—demand large amounts of critical resources like energy, land, and water. As the world’s urban population is expected to grow by billions in the next decades, urban heat adaptions’ higher resource demands will face increasing constraints. Because cities also need to reduce fossil energy use to mitigate emissions, preserve land for food production and natural habitats, and conserve the increasingly scarce freshwater.