Urban Heat Stress Tracker: Smaller cities-Chandigarh, Jaipur, Lucknow and Pune

সারমর্ম

This report was published by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi, on August 14, 2024. It tracks the patterns of heat and land surface temperature along with urban expansion from 2001-2023. The study focuses on these trends in the four smaller metro cities of Chandigarh, Jaipur, Lucknow and Pune. It is written by Sharanjeet Kaur and Avikal Somvanshi, researchers working with CSE.

The report highlights the growing concerns over rapidly changing climate trends and an increase in the incidence of heat waves across Indian cities. Heat stress affects economies and infrastructure and consequently the well-being of the people, the study notes. Increases in urban built-up areas intensify heat exposure and necessitate the implementation of city-specific heat action plans beyond just provisioning for emergency relief. The study underscores the need to implement rigorous scientific tracking of land use, along with land surface temperatures and heat trends to inform urban heat mitigation strategies and policymaking.

The analysis utilises weather station and satellite data from open-source data sets to track patterns of land use as well as temperature trends. The assessment provides insight into heat management strategies by presenting figures from the summers of 2003, 2013 and 2023. The study shows that an increase in urban expansion in all four cities has led to an increase in heat stress. Trends in surface temperatures across the four cities could be explained by the changes in land-use patterns over the years.

This 13-page document is divided into three sections: Overview (Section 1); Methodology and Data (Section 2); and Key Findings (Section 3).

    রিপোর্টের মূল নির্যাস

  1. Heat stress is intensified in urban environments due to human activities and heat-trapping by concrete buildings. It threatens people's well-being by affecting infrastructure like roads, water and energy as well as the economy. Growing urbanisation and climate projections imply increasing urban heat stress that needs to be tackled by city-specific management regimes and policymaking beyond just providing emergency relief.

  2. Cities like Delhi are already developing heat stress mitigation strategies and policy frameworks, the study notes. Such measures require sustained action tracking weather and land-use variables, and utilising more robust scientific technologies to understand the impact of concretisation on the urban environment.

  3. All four small metro cities in this study saw an increase in built-up area over time due to rapid urban expansion. There was also an associated increase in urban heat stress.

  4. Land-use allocations predominantly determine the land surface temperatures in a given year. A high proportion of barren and scrub land contributed to high temperatures in Jaipur, Lucknow and Pune as this land absorbs the sun’s rays, the study notes.

  5. During their hottest summers, the highest built-up areas within the studied cities consistently experienced much higher land surface temperatures than the average overall city-wide temperature.

  6. Conversely, in their hottest summers, areas within the cities with dense green cover and those near water bodies experienced significantly lower temperatures consistently.


    Focus and Factoids by Satavisha De.

লেখক

Sharanjeet Kaur and Avikal Somvanshi

কপিরাইট

Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi

প্রকাশনার তারিখ

14 অগস্ট, 2024

ট্যাগ

#environment #climate-change #heat-stress

শেয়ার করুন