Green Spaces Cooling Effects | The Strategic Way to Achieve
In this new study, researchers from Seoul, South Korea, looked at how strategically placed green spaces in cities can help to cool them down. Their goal was to learn more about the different kinds of green spaces in cities, which are important for keeping the city cool. Since the 1960s, the number of people living in cities has been growing quickly. By 2030, about 81% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. This fast growth of cities has led to more building and pollution, both of which are major causes of climate change and rising temperatures.
What green space means for LST
Even though a lot of green space can help cut down on LST, there are a few things to think about when planning and putting it in place. Some of these factors are the number of people living in an area, the type of land cover around it, the number of green spaces nearby, and the difference in temperature between night and day. In addition to these factors, the placement of green spaces should maximize the local landscape’s heterogeneity, which increases temperature differences at the surface and speeds up air flow. Several ways have been thought of to measure these things.
The WHO says that every city should have at least one green space, and a lot of U.S. cities meet this goal. The study found that having access to green spaces can save 42,968 lives each year and 64,171 lives when an NDVI proxy is used. The authors say that being close to green space and how green it is are better indicators of health than greenness alone. But they didn’t have good information on how NDVI and %GA affected the exposure-response functions.
How much it costs to plant and take care of green space in cities
Plants have many benefits, such as lowering energy costs and making it easier for air to move around. It can also lower the temperature by blocking the sun and making it cooler. It can also help bring in money from other countries and make a city look better. Green spaces in cities also help clean up the air and keep the natural history of the area alive.
Green spaces in cities are important places to relax and have fun. They should be spread out evenly across the city and be big enough to meet the needs of the people who live there. Adding green space can also make people healthier, bring ecosystems back to life, and raise the value of a home. But urban forests are not risk-free. Even though they might make urban environmental problems worse, they might also cause new ones. In addition to doing a lot for the ecosystem, urban forests can keep nutrients from leaching out of the soil, improve the quality of the air, control the temperature, and store carbon.
How the structure of green spaces affects how well they cool
How well green spaces cool depends on how they are built. The more regular the shape of a green space, the more it can cool. On the other hand, the less cooling a green space can do, the more complicated its shape. A complicated green space won’t be as good at cooling as a simple one because it will have to work harder to get to a certain temperature.
The most important things that affect how well a green space cools are its area, its shape index (GSI), and its perimeter. The best way to cool down is to have a large, regular green space. A green space needs to be at least 50 hm2 in size. Each green space’s cooling capacity was looked at on its own, and at different levels of green space coverage, each space’s contribution to cooling efficiency was looked at.
How trees affect how surfaces cool down
Studies have shown that the air temperature dropped by between 0.7 and 1.3 degC when there were more trees in the canopy. However, the effect of increased canopy coverage was greater at larger scales. For example, the air temperature dropped by 1.2 degC when the canopy cover grew by 1% within a 10-m radius. This effect was even stronger when more than 50% of the trees were covered by a canopy.
Costs of putting in smart cooling systems on roofs
Smart rooftop cooling systems lower the average surface temperature of a building, which lowers the energy bills of the building’s owners and tenants. But these systems don’t always have effects that can be felt over long distances. In cities, the air flow and heat sources can be greatly limited by the environment. To make a good plan for cooling, you need to know what the local conditions are like.
Planting trees in strategic green spaces is one way to lower temperatures. Trees lower the temperature by blocking the heat that comes from the sun, which lets the canopy sweat. But at night, when photosynthesis stops, the canopy has less of an effect. This reduced effect may also be caused by the way heat is stored in surfaces that don’t let it out. Urban canyons and built-up areas may trap radiation at night.
As cities in the Global South get hotter, they will likely need cooling methods that use more energy to keep them cool. But there isn’t enough research on cooling energy needs right now to give an accurate estimate. Finding good policies for cooling energy requires input from many different areas, such as research, policymaking, and industry.