Urban heat island

Urban heat island | World Meteorological Organization

How the urban heat island effect can impact summer overheating

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Slicing five miles through this southern city’s downtown, Broadway shows just how challenging it can be for a sweltering urban center to beat the dangerous summer heat. Louisville’s main drag leaves the upscale and relatively leafy Highlands neighborhood and heads west, where it widens to seven lanes of black asphalt and enters […]

Fostering Sustainable Cities

Urban heat islands threaten our health, our ability to reduce our carbon output and the...

July was the hottest month ever recorded globally, and it was especially brutal for major metros.

Heat islands are urban areas that can have higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas with more greenery. Heat islands are caused by several factors,…

How built-up cities and higher temperatures threaten human health.

Extreme heat is the number-one weather-related cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and extreme heat can also harm infrastructure as well as the overall economy. What if it were possible to make cities cooler—that is, actually lower urban temperatures to improve the quality of life—with more-resilient development?

Global temperatures are rising. This is especially felt in urban areas due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect, where temperatures can be 10oF (5.5oC) higher than the surrounding countryside. This phenomenon is due to several factors that combine to alter the local microclimate of an urban area. However, several techniques can be employed by landscape architects to help combat the local rise in temperatures, saving money, reducing global warming, and making a more pleasant environment to…