Global climate change is expected to pose increasing challenges for cities in the following decades, placing greater stress and impacts on multiple social and biophysical systems, including population health, coastal development, urban infrastructure, energy demand, and water supplies. Simultaneously, a strong global trend towards urbanisation of poverty exists, with increased challenges for ur...

Urban environments result in substantial changes to the roughness and radiative properties of the surface – these changes can affect local weather and climate within the urban canopy. The Chicago metropolitan area has experienced dramatic urban growth over the past few decades resulting in significant changes in land cover. The effects of this increasing urban environment are modeled to gain in...

Facing climate change and global warming, outdoor climatic environment is an important consideration factor for planners and policy makers because improving it can greatly contribute to achieve citizen’s thermal comfort and create a better urban living quality for adaptation. Thus, the climatic information must be assessed systematically and applied strategically into the planning process. This...

Better understanding of urban microclimate and bioclimate of any city is imperative today when the world is constrained by both urbanisation and global climate change. Urbanisation generally triggers changes in land cover and hence influencing the urban local climate. Dar es Salaam city in Tanzania is one of the fast growing cities. Assessment of its urban climate and the human biometeorologica...

Urbanization, the expansion of built-up areas, is an important yet less-studied aspect of land use/land cover change in climate science. To date, most global climate models used to evaluate effects of land use/land cover change on climate do not include an urban parameterization. Here, the authors describe the formulation and evaluation of a parameterization of urban areas that is incorporated ...

urban growth and associated landscape transformation has been a major driver of local, regionaland global environmental change. the conversion of urban greenery to impervious landscapes has been identifiedas a key factor influencing the distinctive urban heat and associated consequences. due to the often highdemand for space in urban areas, creation and preservation of urban greenery as heat si...

In Central Europe up to 85% of the population lives in cities or urban agglomerations (United Nations 2000). This makes the urban climate and its anthropogenic modifications an important issue for planners, scientists and policy makers. The urban climate differs completely from that of rural or forested areas. Since urban surfaces are extremely heterogeneous the interaction with the urban bound...

This study presents a conceptual framework for analyzing urban resilience in the context of climate change. The key conceptual elements of resilience are first identified and then reorganized with a focus on cities and climate change adaptation. This study covers not only ecological and engineering resilience but also resilience as a sociopolitical process from an evolutionary perspective. The ...

BACKGROUND Heatwaves present a significant health risk and the hazard is likely to escalate with the increased future temperatures presently predicted by climate change models. The impact of heatwaves is often felt strongest in towns and cities where populations are concentrated and where the climate is often unintentionally modified to produce an urban heat island effect; where urban areas can...

The ongoing European collaborative project SUDPLAN is targeted on the development of a software framework that allows the integration of climate change aspects in urban planning processes. Besides the implementation of the generic modules SUDPLAN comprises the implementation of four tangible pilot applications of the framework, one of them in the German City of Wuppertal. This “Wuppertal pilot”...