The Contribution of Trees to Increase Resilience of Urban Areas to Climate Change

Climate change is decreasing human wellbeing in urban areas: the rising of temperatures coupled with aridity increase the heat island effect, the extreme weather events cause floods and the stormwaters runoff increases water pollution. The number of people living in metropolitan areas has exceeded that of people in agricultural areas and this trend continues. So, in the future the climate change effects in urban areas will affect the well-being of more and more people.

Green Urban Infrastructures (GUIs) are urban environments where the built system is coupled with plants, mainly trees. GUI can mitigate the climate change effects in urban areas enhancing their resilience and improving quality of life of inhabitants. Trees play a pivot role in urban forests, gardens, parks or even as road trees, providing ecosystem services that are not simply aesthetic or recreational. Trees change microclimatic conditions decreasing overall temperature thanks to evapotranspiration and shadowing, improve air quality by removing particulate, decrease stormwater runoff thanks to root absorption.

Although trees and plants are generally the main part of GUIs, the choice of species and the design of GUIs often takes more into account aesthetic criteria than their functional role as providers of ecosystem services. In this respect more attention on both physiological and morphological features of trees should be paid to better plan GUIs able to mitigate climate change effects in urban areas.

In this special issue we invite all scientists with different skills to submit papers dealing with the contribute of trees to be used in GUIs to mitigate climate change effects in urban areas. Papers submitted in this special issue are expected to give practical information that could be used by other professional figures usually interested in GUIs such as engineers, urban planners and stakeholders to help them in their design choices.

Dr. Sandro STRUMIA
Guest Editor

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