Climate sensitivity to land use changes over the city of Brussels

Abstract

Prompted with the ongoing and projected climate change, a wide range of cities have committed, not only to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions but also to implement different climate change adaptation measures. These measures serve to ensure the wellbeing of the urban population. In practice, however, the planning of realistic adaptation measures is a complex process. Prior to starting such endeavor, it may therefore be useful to explore the maximum potential benefit that can be gained through adaptation measures. In this work, simple, extreme yet realistic adaptation measures are proposed in terms of changes in albedo and vegetation fraction. The impact of these land-use scenarios is explored by use of the land surface model SURFEX on the summer climate in terms of heat waves and the urban heat island for the city of Brussels. This is done for different periods in the future using the greenhouse gas scenario RCP8.5.

The State-of-the-Art of Urban Climate Change Modeling and Observations

“…As the urban dwellers are unable to recover from extreme temperature during daytime, the urban heat island (UHI) effect can be particularly detrimental to public health during heat waves (De Troeyer et al 2020). Land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) are expected to strongly impact climate warming trajectories in the near future (Cugnon et al 2019;IPCC 2019;Kuang 2020b). Optimizing LULCC may lead to reduced climate warming at regional scale, as well as increased carbon sequestration.…”

Species-level classification of urban trees from worldview-2 imagery in Debrecen, Hungary: an effective tool for planning a comprehensive green network to reduce dust pollution

“…The creation and maintenance of a green network in the urban fabric is also a primary tool of sustainable development (Mougiakou and Photis, 2014;Tulisi, 2017;Kertész and Křeček, 2019). Urban trees bring economic, psychological, recreational and aesthetic benefits, as well as mitigate climatic stress and urban heat islands (Wu and Zhang, 2008;Savić et al, 2013;Milošević et al, 2016;Cugnon et al, 2019), reduce air pollutants, and improve air quality (Yang et al, 2015;Hofman et al, 2016;Molnár et al, 2018. As their role is irreplaceable, we need to pay particular attention to their assessment.…”