Urban Heat and Pollution Islands (UHI and UPI): Health Impacts and Mitigation Strategies
A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Architectural Design, Urban Science, and Real Estate".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 December 2026 | Viewed by 253
Editors
Interests: urban microclimate; climate change; field ceasurements; CFD; thermal comfort; machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: environmental modeling; urban air pollution; exposure assessment; environmental epidemiology; spatial analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: climate change; urban climate; air pollution; extreme events; WRF; LiDAR
Interests: indoor air quality; Bayesian inference; gray-box model; sleeping thermal comfort; thermal manikin
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Urban heat islands (UHI) and urban pollution islands (UPI) are emerging as dual stressors on cities worldwide. Dense built-up areas, limited vegetation, and intense anthropogenic activities trap heat and concentrate pollutants, resulting in elevated temperatures, degraded air quality, and prolonged exposure to harmful compounds. As climate change drives more frequent and severe heatwaves, these coupled heat–pollution extremes amplify public-health burdens, especially for children, older adults, outdoor workers, and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. This Special Issue, “Urban Heat and Pollution Islands (UHI and UPI): Health Impacts and Mitigation Strategies,” aims to advance understanding of how urban form, microclimate, and emissions interact to shape human exposure, and how integrated mitigation can deliver co-benefits for health, equity, and climate resilience. Beyond diagnosing risks, we particularly encourage research exploring synergistic mitigation strategies—those that simultaneously reduce heat accumulation, enhance ventilation, lower pollutant concentrations, and strengthen resilience during extreme events such as heatwaves, smoke intrusions, and stagnation episodes. Such solutions may include coordinated heat–pollution early-warning systems, nature-based interventions, cool-materials deployment, enhanced building ventilation and filtration, and multi-scale urban design modifications that mitigate both temperature and pollutant buildup.
We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that bridge urban climatology, air-quality science, building physics, epidemiology, public health, and urban planning.
Potential topics for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:
- Characterisation and monitoring of urban heat and pollution islands across spatial and temporal scales;
- Coupled modelling of microclimate, ventilation, and pollutant dispersion in streets, canyons, and buildings;
- Health impact, exposure, and vulnerability assessments under compound heat–air pollution episodes;
- Integrated mitigation strategies for reducing both urban heat and pollution, including nature-based and blue–green infrastructure, cool materials, reflective or vegetated roofs and façades, and urban greening interventions;
- Building and neighbourhood design strategies that enhance shading, ventilation, passive cooling, and filtration performance;
- Solutions for extreme events: heatwave-ready designs, smoke-ready buildings, emergency cooling and clean-air shelters, and combined heat–air-quality early-warning systems;
- Data-driven and AI-assisted tools for risk mapping, early warning, behavioural guidance, and decision support.
Dr. Jiwei Zou
Dr. Xuying Ma
Dr. Jing Kong
Dr. Shujie Yan
Dr. Xin Zhang
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- urban heat island (UHI)
- urban pollution island (UPI)
- climate change
- urban microclimate
- air quality
- mitigation stratigies
- human exposure
- health impacts
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