As any urban dweller who has lived through a heat wave knows, a shady tree can make all the difference.
As any urban dweller who has lived through a heat wave knows, a shady tree can make all the difference. But what happens when there’s no shade available?
A recent study in Nature Communications used NASA satellite data to identify a major gap in global resilience to climate change: cities in the Global South have far less green space — and therefore less cooling capacity — than cities in the Global North. The terms Global North and Global South were used in the study to distinguish developed countries (mostly in the Northern Hemisphere) from developing nations (mostly in the Southern Hemisphere).
Cities tend to be hotter than nearby rural areas because of the urban heat island effect. Heat-trapping dark surfaces such as sidewalks, buildings, and roads absorb heat from the Sun’s rays, which raises the temperature of the city. Extreme heat poses serious health threats for urban residents, including dehydration, heat stroke, and even death. Though not a cure-all, greenery provides shade and releases moisture into the air, cooling the surroundings.
Read more at NASA
Image: The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the NASA and U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat 8 satellite captured this natural color image of Sanaa, Yemen, on June 8, 2024. Sanaa, which has a hot, dry climate and little green space, had the second-lowest cooling capacity of 500 cities studied in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications. (Credit: Wanmei Liang, NASA Earth Observatory)
