Impacts of Urban Overheating on Human Life: the Potential of Mitigation and Adaptation Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Local climate change, including but not limited to the Urban Heat Island effect, is driven by the increasing expansion of our cities and enhanced by global climate change. The ensuing outcome is one of the main environmental challenges of today with major impacts on energy and human health. As the outdoor ambient temperature is increased during the cooling season, total and peak cooling energy and electricity demands rise consequently. Additionally, urban overheating impacts human well-being and health, ranging from increased thermal stress to peaks in morbidity and mortality, specifically during heatwaves. Therefore, it is paramount that mitigation and adaptation strategies for urban heating and overheating are proposed and assessed in detail.

To respond to this urgency, we invite researchers to contribute original research and review articles dealing with all aspects of urban heating and its impact on human life in urban areas. These contributions include recent experimental and modeling studies, implementing techniques and developments tailored to the assessment of urban heating, as well as mitigation and adaptation scenarios proposed and assessed in various urban climates. We are also interested in reviews with possible future lines of investigation. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• To investigate the impact of urban overheating on building energy needs, electricity demand, health, economy, and hygrothermal comfort.
• To propose comprehensive methodologies and metrics for quantifying the local and global impact of urban overheating.
• To present the cooling potential of innovative mitigation and adaptation technologies (from both urban and building design perspectives). In particular, we are interested in original contributions on the development and testing of methods to measure and model the performance of consolidated and advanced technologies, with the identification of the elements of uncertainty, evaluating their reliability and performance in the context of application.
• To evaluate the impact and role of advanced mitigation and adaptation policies on human health, energy, peak electricity demand, environment, economy, and comfort.
• To present innovative application of mitigation and adaptation solution in large-scale projects both at the theoretical and experimental level.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Negin Nazarian

Dr. Riccardo Paolini
Guest Editors

Prof. Dr. Mattheos Santamouris
Scientific Advisor

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