Beyond the Urban Heat Island Effect: Designing Resilient Land Systems for Equitable Climate Futures

Dear Colleagues,

The urban heat island effect not only exacerbates energy consumption and air pollution, but also poses a profound threat to public health and social equity, especially for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and low-income people, as well as resource-scarce areas. As climate change intensifies, the deterioration of the urban thermal environment will further aggravate social equity among urban regions. Therefore, ways of designing land systems and building urban and regional spaces that consider climate resilience and equality concerns have received widespread attention.

This Special Issue aims to promote the transformation of urban heat island governance from thermal environment regulations to multi-dimensional and systematic "land-climate-society" frameworks, emphasizing the innovations in applications and the interdisciplinary integration of land system science in responses to heat risk and social equity.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• From UHI to intral-UHI: Fine-scale Mapping, Dynamic Monitoring, and Thermal Risk Modeling based on LCZ;
• The Cooling Effects of Blue-Green Infrastructure: Performance and Synergies from Sponge Cities to “Cool Cities”;
• Thermal Health Equity: The Socioeconomic Dimensions of Exposure, Sensitivity, and Adaptive Capacity;
• Drivers and Responses: Land System Change, Governance Models, and Policy Innovations;
• Emerging Technologies and Future Scenarios: AI, Smart Cooling, Low-Altitude Sensing and Applications for Precision Land Management and Resilient Infrastructure;
• Towards Equitable Climate Futures: Systemic Integration and Transition Pathways.

Dr. Xilin Zhou
Dr. Yasuyuki Ishida
Dr. Meng Cai
Dr. Zheng Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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