With cities responsible for over 75 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere, the city represents an ideal place of scale to affect climate change.
“There are many examples of cities that have clearly gone down the wrong path and now are trying to reverse themselves,” says Professor Mills, UCD School of Geography, University College Dublin.
“If you take the Chinese cities that are emerging, the sheer scale of the urbanisation process, the level of industry, the level of pollution, is simply astonishing.”
“Everything that we learned from New York City, Los Angeles, Dublin, London, and the large German cities of the past about air quality seems to have been entirely forgotten and is being relearned in those cities,” he adds.
Using our knowledge of what makes up an urban ecosystem and the physical properties governing the creation of distinct urban climates (like airflow around buildings, the heat island, precipitation modification and air pollution), it is possible to moderate the undesirable consequences of urban development and help create more sustainable and resilient cities.
The rate of urbanisation is greatest in poorer economies, where city building is taking place very rapidly. In the search for climate justice, it is critical that new cities do not follow the path taken by those elsewhere.
Urban climate science is now a fully-fledged field and this book brings together the disparate parts of climate research on cities into a coherent framework.
It is the first comprehensive survey of the effect of cities on climates at all scales and the impact of global and regional climate change on cities. Moreover, it places urban-scale adaption and mitigation strategies within the context of an urban climate science.
It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in fields such as climatology, urban hydrology, air quality, environmental engineering and urban design.
Urban Climates by T. R. Oke, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; G. Mills, University College Dublin; A. Christen, University of Freiburg; and J. A. Voogt, University of Western Ontario (Cambridge University Press) develops a comprehensive terminology for the subject using scale and surface classification as key constructs.
Urban Climates was published by @CambridgeUP: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/urban-climates/A02424592E1C7F9B9CD69DAD57A5B50B
Reviews:
“A signature textbook has been lacking for some time now within the field of Urban Climate. We now have it. The content, quality and scope of Urban Climates are just what you would expect from some of the most respected urban climatologists in the world. I look forward to using it for my applied climatology in the urban environment class at the University of Georgia.” – Marshall Shepherd, University of Georgia and former President of the American Meteorological Society.
“Urban Climates is a must-read for students and scientists. From climatology to urban planning, it is very clear and complete, from concepts and processes to practical implementation and adaptation of cities to climate. It is illustrated with explicative diagrams of exceptional quality and many examples of this ‘collection of microclimates’ in various cities. Beyond the clear and rigorous overview of the physics of the urban atmosphere, Urban Climates offers a fantastic travel through the history of climate in cities around the world, from preindustrial cities and before to modern high-rise megacities.” – Valéry Masson, Météo-France and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
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