The key to cooling ‘urban heat islands’ may lie in the countryside, according to a new study from scientists at the University of Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) and Southeast University (China).
The key to cooling ‘urban heat islands’ may lie in the countryside, according to a new study from scientists at the University of Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) and Southeast University (China).
Using 20 years of data, researchers showed how nearby rural areas could bring a city’s temperature down. The biggest cooling effects happen where the rural ring around a city extends for at least half the city’s diameter.
Professor Shi-Jie Cao, the lead author and visiting professor at the University of Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), said:
"We often focus on how green spaces, wetlands or waterways can cool down cities. Yet, urban land is precious, and these measures can be hard to find space for. We have now shown how land use outside a city can make a big difference to temperatures downtown.
"Our findings allow us to make quite specific recommendations. We found that urban over-heating was mitigated more by joining up patches of rural land, planting more woodland scattered around a city, and by having fewer, bigger lakes rather than lots of little bodies of water."
Read more at University of Surrey
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