Projecting global urban land expansion and heat island intensification through 2050

TLDR

Urban populations are projected to grow by 2–3 billion by 2050, yet the impact of future global urban expansion on urban heat islands and extreme heat risk distribution remains poorly understood, underscoring the need for policies to limit or redistribute expansion and mitigate UHIs in vulnerable cities. The study develops spatially explicit probabilistic global projections of UHI intensification caused by urban land expansion through 2050. Projections indicate that urban land will expand by 0.6–1.3 million km² (a 78–171 % increase) between 2015 and 2050, leading to average summer daytime and nighttime warming of 0.5–0.7 °C (up to ~3 °C locally), roughly half to twice the warming from GHG emissions, and increasing extreme heat risks for about half of the future urban population, mainly in the tropical Global South.

Abstract

Abstract Urban populations are expected to increase by 2–3 billion by 2050, but we have limited understanding of how future global urban expansion will affect urban heat island (UHI) and hence change the geographic distributions of extreme heat risks. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic global projections of UHI intensification due to urban land expansion through 2050. Our projections show that urban land areas are expected to expand by 0.6–1.3 million km 2 between 2015 and 2050, an increase of 78%–171% over the urban footprint in 2015. This urban land expansion will result in average summer daytime and nighttime warming in air temperature of 0.5 °C–0.7 °C, up to ∼3 °C in some locations. This warming is on average about half, and sometimes up to two times, as strong as that caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (multi-model ensemble average projections in Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5). This extra urban expansion-induced warming, presented here, will increase extreme heat risks for about half of the future urban population, primarily in the tropical Global South, where existing forecasts already indicate stronger GHG emissions-warming and lack of adaptive capacity. In these vulnerable urban areas, policy interventions to restrict or redistribute urban expansion and planning strategies to mitigate UHIs are needed to reduce the wide ranges of impacts on human health, energy system, urban ecosystem, and infrastructures.