Assessing Heat Health Risk for Sustainability in Beijing’s Urban Heat Island

Abstract

This research is motivated by the increasing threat of urban heat waves that are likely worsened by pervasive global warming and urbanization. Different regions of the city including urban, borderland and rural area will experience different levels of heat health risk. In this paper, we propose an improved approach to quantitatively assess Beijing's heat health risk based on three factors from hazard, vulnerability and especially environment which is considered as an independent factor because different land use/cover types have different influence on ambient air temperatures under the Urban Heat Island effect. The results show that the heat health risk of Beijing demonstrates a spatial-temporal pattern with higher risk in the urban area, lower risk in the borderland between urban and rural area, and lowest risk in the rural area, and the total risk fluctuated dramatically during 2008-2011. To be more specific, the heat health risk was clearly higher in 2009 and 2010 than in 2008 and 2011. Further analysis with the urban area at sub-district level signifies that the impervious surface (urban area such as buildings, roads, et al.) ratio is of high correlation with the heat health risk. The validation results show that the proposed method improved the accuracy of heat OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2014, 6 7335 health risk assessment. We recommend that policy makers should develop efficient urban planning to accomplish Beijing's sustainable development.

New climate and socio-economic scenarios for assessing global human health challenges due to heat risk

“…Multiple studies have used the equal weight method to calculate vulnerability (e.g., Collins et al 2009;Tomlinson et al 2011;Vescovi et al 2005;Dong et al 2014). To compare the influence of the weight variance of vulnerability factors on heat risk, we computed the global mean risk under the condition that the weight of Aged ranges from 0.1 to 0.9 (step: 0.1) by the ratio of weight (GDP) and weight (edu) ranges from 0.1 to 0.9 (step: 0.1) and 1 to 10 (step: 1).…”

Global and regional changes in exposure to extreme heat and the relative contributions of climate and population change

“…Accordingly, many studies have focused on future heat wave risk assessment13141516, which attempts to estimate the probable heat-related mortality and morbidity of people that an area would experience1317 as a function of the changing characteristics of a given hazard, the number of people exposed to that hazard and their sensitivity and adaptive capacity to that hazard1218. However, this last characteristic, which represents a population’s vulnerability to a particular hazard, can vary significantly for various factors such as age, season and geographic region19.…”

The Urban Heat Island Effect in the City of Valencia: A Case Study for Hot Summer Days

“…As urban heat islands pose an additional risk to urban inhabitants [7], spatial heat risk assessments are carried out worldwide to identify the most vulnerable segments of the urban population [8][9][10]. Excessive heat negatively influences not only human health [11]-including increasing mortality rates due to heat stress [12] and more frequent insomnia events during hot nights [13]-but it has an impact on the labour productivity [14] and the urban metabolism as well [15,16].…”