Urban Heat Island Mitigation Strategies, City of The Future Singapore.
It’s becoming a tremendous risk to human health as growing urban populations exacerbate the heating effect of climate change.
We know the common phenomena that where there’s greenery; the temperature is lower. That’s because things like asphalt, concrete, and shingled roofs absorb more heat from the sun than trees. This is the urban heat island effect, and it accounts for the higher temperatures in cities often by several degrees compared with that surroundings.
Heatwaves kill more people than any other extreme weather event, more than tornadoes, hurricanes, and even floods. That’s why urban heat island mitigation strategies are being studied in Singapore by a group of Researchers. The Government-backed project called cooling Singapore is now combining everything they’ve learned to create a digital tool that can help cities all over the world.
Starting with Singapore, closing to the equator, temperatures regularly rise above 32 degrees Celsius or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And the city structures only make it worse, and that is also the case for Singapore, which is a concrete jungle, more urbanized, more developed city. Even in Singapore, what you have is a situation whereby there’s a temperature difference of 7 degrees Celsius between the more urbanized and the more rural areas.
The Government has taken drastic steps to keep the temperature down. The Most Famous is the “Gardens by the Bay” an award-winning park, inside this greenhouse it’s a pleasant 24 degrees. That’s because the dome, along with two dozen nearby towers full of thousands of people, is chilled by what’s probably the world’s largest underground cooling system. It uses the large central plant that cools the water and then pipes it into banks, residential towers, exhibition centers, shopping malls, and the city’s iconic “Marina Bay Sands Hotel” and Casino Complex.
So one of the biggest perks of using this system for the buildings is that they can save 40% in terms of electricity usage compared to your traditional air conditioners. Singapore relying on natural gas for most of its power, this new system means emissions savings equivalent to removing 10,000 cars from the city’s roads, which has big implications for the rest of the world. If things stay as they are, more than a third of the world’s electricity could end up being used to cool buildings and vehicles by 2050.
It’s a vicious circle, and so since 2017, researchers are cooling Singapore has been identifying design solutions that reduce our need for so much cool air. Luckily, Singapore has been striving for the Garden city feel for quite some time. It was a vision initially introduced by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1967 to make life more pleasant for people. Today, Singapore is one of the world’s greenest cities in terms of urban vegetation.
“Kampung Admiralty” a community center that contains health facilities and social spaces, now provides more green space than a plot of land they originally built it on. It’s topped by a roof-scape of staggered terraces covered in local plants, which functions as a community park, and the village green in the center that contains farm plots for residents to tend to.
“Park-royal on Pickering” was designed as a hotel in the garden that doubled the green-growing potential of its site. There’s are now 15,000 meters of sky gardens, reflecting pools, waterfalls, planter terraces, and green walls. The Government has comprehensive plans as well.
“ One thing cities have in common and that’s the importance of vegetation. That’s a very important measure to mitigate the urban heat. Because of the shading effect, of course, and deep psychological effects of the vegetation and because of the possible evaporative cooling effect of the vegetation. Vegetation can be on the ground floor, as trees and shrubs, and you can walk under them. This is the so-called canopy layer that the vegetation forms above us. But vegetation can also go up the facades of buildings and it can go to the roof of buildings” Prof Gerhard Schmidt (Lead Principal Investigator, Cooling Singapore).
But that’s not enough. The city-state has been warming twice as quickly as the world’s average over the past six decades. That’s why cooling Singapore has developed a catalog of other potential heat-mitigation measures. With so many fresh ideas, cooling Singapore also designing a virtual model of the city to test them out. It is called Digital Urban Climate Twin or DUCT, which will calculate how each element of the city’s design will impact the urban heat island effect.
Singapore will use this new tool to figure out which actions it should take next and the model can apply to any city, whether it needs to keep heat out or keep heat in. Which will ultimately save energy, slow climate change, and improve quality of life.
ALL THE BEST
Salman RAZA
