Gara Villalba (UAB) — Modelling the impact of green infrastructure on future heat wave episodes and greenhouse gas fluxes at the urban scale

💡♻️ A RES Success Story about the impact of local, green infrastructures ♻️💡

📋 "Modelling the impact of green infrastructure on future heat wave episodes and greenhouse gas fluxes at the urban scale" led by Gara Villalba from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

The research within the ERC-funded project "URBAG" studied the impact of different greening strategies in the urban scale using high resolution simulations (<1km). The team used, developed and modified atmospheric transport models to evaluate the impact of Green Infrastructures (GI) and the influence of urban morphology and land use in temperature and air quality. 

🖥 Thanks to RES supercomputer #Picasso from Universidad de Málaga, the team found that cool roofs can reduce temperature by more than 2ºC, and by 3ºC when combined with green spaces, in Barcelona-like cities. They also found that street trees highly improved human confort through shading and evapotranspirative cooling, with streets with more trees being 1.3ºC cooler than those with fewer trees. More technical info about this can be found at: https://lnkd.in/eBu5fCcW
https://lnkd.in/euC9Unp9

Additionally, irrigated peri-urban agriculture can enhance local food production by up to 86% and reduce surface summer temperatures by 0.7ºC, but at the cost of more water consumption, reduced ecosystem productivity and carbon stocks from the biomass. More info at: https://lnkd.in/eRQbM2Dr

📷 The upper image shows the temperature impact of the size variation of agricultural areas, while the bottom image shows the impact of cool roofs and green roofs in the daytime temperature in a 2100 scenario.