Overheating of cities is causing serious energy, environmental and health problems and it has a serious impact on the whole economic and cultural life of cities. To counterbalance the impact of high urban temperatures several mitigation technologies have been proposed, developed and implemented.

Landscape architecture focuses on the relationship between the natural and the built environment.  As we move towards an uncertain future, our methods for understanding that relationship must shift from reliance on what we know about our environment, to what we can anticipate for the future.

We're aiming to increase Greater Sydney's tree canopy to 40% by 2030 by planting more trees in streets, parks, bushland areas and yards.
That’s more trees in our streets, parks, backyards, neighbourhoods and schools, so we can grow our tree canopy from 16.8%* to 40% (*source Office of Environment and Heritage, 2011).

Despite the importance of urban trees, their growth reaction to climate change and to the urban heat island effect has not yet been investigated with an international scope. While we are well informed about forest growth under recent conditions, it is unclear if this knowledge can be simply transferred to urban environments.

Sustainable Sydney 2030 outlined the aspiration of our community and businesses for our local government area to be an environmental leader on a global scale. To guide the implementation of Sustainable Sydney 2030, the City developed a series of environmental master plans and strategies between 2008 and 2015. This strategy and action plan combines the insights and data from these documents.

Water's role in liveability: Heat, Waterways and Urban Amenity

There is ample evidence of the cooling effects of green infrastructure (GI) that has been extensively documented in the literature. However, the study of the thermal profiles of different GI typologies requires the classification of urban sites for a meaningful comparison of results, since specific spatial and physical characteristics produce distinct microclimates.

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect can result in higher urban densities being significantly hotter (frequently more than 4 °C, even up to 10 °C) compared to their peri-urban surroundings. Such artificial heat stress increases the health risk of spending time outdoors and boosts the need for energy consumption, particularly for cooling during summer.

Cities are frequently experiencing artificial heat stress, known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. The UHI effect is commonly present in cities due to increased urbanization, where anthropogenic heat and human modifications have altered the characteristics of surfaces and atmosphere.

Highlights

Urban structure, hard surfaces and shortage of vegetation cause an artificial temperature increase in cities, known as the urban heat island effect. This paper determines the daily patterns of urban heat in Adelaide, Australia.

This paper describes ground-based thermal infrared (TIR) data collection and the development of a multivariate regression model to predict brightness surface temperature from thermal images.