Decrease in the residents’ accessibility of summer cooling services due to green space loss in Chinese cities

Environment International

Zhibin Ren¹  Nanlin Hu¹  Xingyuan He¹  Yulin Dong²  Yao Fu²  Guangliang Jia²  Yujie Guo³ 

[1] University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China;School of Geography and Engineering of Land Resources, Yuxi Normal University, Yuxi 653100, China;

关键词: Green space;    Cooling effect;    Remote sensing;    Urban heat;    China;   

DOI  :  

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Urban green spaces (UGSs) reduce the surrounding temperature and create cooling areas as a buffer between people and high temperatures, thus helping residents adapt to the warming climate. However, the accessibility of UGS cooling services to the residents of cities remains largely unknown, which hinders decision-making regarding the formulation of climate adaptation and urban greening schemes. In the present study, we estimated the number of residents who accessed UGSs for cooling by analyzing the annual changes in such cooling areas during summer across 315 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2015. Approximately 93.3% of the cities showed significant decreasing trends (p < 0.05) of the total UGS area; as such the UGS coverage dropped from 12.23 ± 0.32% in 2003 to 7.69 ± 0.22% in 2015. Consequently, with the prevalent loss of UGS, the coverage of cooling spaces decreased from 32.55 ± 0.76% in 2003 to 24.39 ± 0.60% in 2015. This has formed a spatial mismatch between the growing urban population and the remaining UGSs. Accordingly, the number of residents of areas outside these cooling spaces increased by 4.23 million per year. In particular, the shortage of cooling services was more significant in cities with < 20,000 USD gross domestic product per capita and < 5 million residents than in the rest of the cities. To minimize the adverse impacts of increasing temperatures, focused greening plans are warranted, specifically in underdeveloped cities.

【 授权许可】

Unknown