Speaker
Description
Being able to quantify the future evolution of heat stress in cities and to develop smart adaptation strategies to counter its impacts requires the capturing of fine-grained variations in heat-related hazards within the urban fabric. However, the coarse resolution of Earth System Models makes it difficult to model urban areas explicitly. Moreover, few outputs of high-resolution modelling of future climate in cities end up in the public domain, and there is limited understanding of the potential of climate-smart urban development for reducing heat stress.
In the H2020 PROVIDE project, we used the urban boundary layer climate model UrbClim coupled with the emulator for Global Mean Temperature FaIR and the Earth System Model emulator with spatially explicit representation MESMER in order to generate projections of urban heat stress at a 100-meter resolution, for about 20 indicators in 140 urban centres across the world. The resulting database is openly accessible in the PROVIDE Climate Risk Dashboard, an online tool that allows visualization and download of global-to-local future climate impacts for various global emission scenarios.
Furthermore, building on this work we develop a prototype climate service that delivers scientific policy-relevant information on the potential of urban greening to reduce heat stress in cities. Following a co-development process involving urban planners and city-level stakeholders in Lisbon (Portugal), Islamabad (Pakistan), and Berlin (Germany), UrbClim is run at very high resolution (down to 1 meter) over parts of these urban centres. The modelling results are also made available in the PROVIDE Climate Risk Dashboard.
| If your abstract is not accepted for an oral presentation, would you be interested in presenting it as a poster instead? | Yes |
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| If accepted by the Scientific Board, I agree to have my presentation/poster and abstract published on the Belgian Climate Centre websites and social media. | Yes |
