Beyond the Urban Heat Island Effect: Designing Resilient Land Systems for Equitable Climate Futures
A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land–Climate Interactions".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2026 | Viewed by 39
Special Issue Editors
Interests: environmental behavior and spatial design; urban heat island; outdoor thermal comfort; wind environment; energy consumption; relocated households; acoustic environment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: ventilation path; engineering; urban environment; CFD
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: urban climatic applications; carbon emission; building energy use modeling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: heat island; local climate; urban environment; GIS
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
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
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 mitigation
- land system resilience
- climate-adaptive planning
- green and blue infrastructure
- socio-ecological equity
- regional climate regulation
- land use/land cover change
- health risk
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