NERC-FAPESP Informed Greening of Cities for Urban Cooling (GreenCities)

在城市地区实施绿色基础设施（GI）在全球范围内越来越受欢迎，因为它提供了美观的绿色空间，有助于减少当地的空气污染，并在否则将由大型混凝土景观，高空气污染水平和不断恶化的生态系统组成的地区维持当地的生态系统。气候对城市地区的影响在全球范围内不断增加，并直接影响到大量城市人口。城市热岛效应加剧了城市中的高气温，导致死亡率增加，工人生产力下降，冷却能源消耗增加。GI（如公园）提供了一种部分减轻不利影响的方法，主要是通过遮阳和蒸发蒸腾冷却。然而，很少有证据表明其在热带地区的冷却潜力，特别是在潮湿的热带城市，高相对湿度大大加剧了热舒适压力，从而放大了健康和经济影响。大多数GI冷却研究是基于空气温度监测的简单断面，在单个公园进行相对较短的持续时间，或“瞬时”测量便携式传感器沿着步行或骑自行车路线。其他研究解释了陆地表面温度的卫星数据，但缺乏对空气温度和热舒适度的可靠转换。这些方法都不能提供具有连续和年度时间变化的精细分辨率的空间数据。绿色城市是一个新的，独特的多学科合作伙伴关系，汇集了英国和巴西科学家的专业知识，他们将合作分享他们的科学思想，并开展世界级的研究，以开发无法单独或通过现有合作实现的新知识。绿色城市旨在解决以下科学问题：“城市公园提供的冷却效益是否会因潮湿热带地区的高湿度而减少，这是否会随着一天中的时间和季节而变化？".该项目的总体目标是围绕创新的监测方法建立国际合作伙伴关系，以更好地了解城市GI可以提供的冷却效果和其他共同利益。我们的目标是应用新技术，如涡度协方差，它提供了高时间分辨率的信息，热量和水蒸气通量，并结合额外的传感器（归一化差异植被指数，热摄像机）和公民科学监测使用巡回传感器提供辅助信息。结合起来，这些将允许通量塔足迹的精细尺度解析，并提供所需的数据，以支持在预测模型内将此类测量放大到城市规模。该项目活动将集中在巴西圣保罗（人口超过2000万），利用巴西先进的涡动协方差专业知识和英国在GI效益建模方面的专业知识，建立可转移到全球其他城市的概念验证。共同创造对于提高公众对地理标志解决方案的接受度和更广泛的接受度非常重要。因此，通过公民科学参与，该项目将发挥教育作用。绿色城市将产生一个国际案例研究，可在英国、巴西和全球其他地方复制。它将产生高影响力的联合出版物，研究人员之间的交流，并开发一种新的方法和指标，用于监测和评估城市公园中使用公民科学的GI的好处。潜在的影响将包括跨学科方法的发展，通过公众研究人员的参与，从整体上评估城市公园提供的生态系统服务，积极影响当前的思维和有效实施地理信息系统的多种应用。

Implementation of green infrastructure (GI) in urban areas is becoming popular globally, as it offers aesthetically pleasing green spaces, helps to reduce local air pollution, and sustain local ecosystems in areas that would otherwise consist of large concrete landscapes, high air pollution levels and deteriorating ecosystems. Climate-related impacts on urban areas are increasing globally, and directly affect a large urban population. High air temperatures in cities are exacerbated by urban heat island (UHI) effects and lead to increased mortality, loss of worker productivity and greater energy consumption for cooling.GI such as parks provides a way to partially mitigate adverse effects, primarily through shade and evapotranspiration cooling. However, there is very little evidence on its cooling potential in tropical regions, particularly for cities in the humid tropics where high relative humidity greatly exacerbates thermal comfort stress, which amplifies both health and economic impacts. The majority of GI cooling studies are based on simple transects of air temperature monitoring, conducted in single parks for relatively short durations, or 'instantaneous' measures from portable sensors along walking or cycling routes. Other studies interpret satellite data on land-surface temperature but lack a robust conversion to air temperature and thermal comfort. None of these approaches provide finely resolved spatial data with continuous and annual temporal variation. GreenCities is a new, unique multi-disciplinary partnership that brings together expertise from UK and Brazilian scientists, who will collaborate to share their scientific ideas and carry out world-class research to develop new knowledge that cannot be achieved alone or by existing collaborations. GreenCities is designed to address the following science question: "Are the cooling benefits provided by urban parks reduced by high humidity in the humid tropics, and does this vary with time of day and season?". The overall goal of this project is to build an international partnership around innovative monitoring approaches to better understand the cooling effects and other co-benefits that urban GI can provide. We aim to apply new technologies such as eddy covariance which give high temporal resolution information on both heat and water vapour fluxes, and a combination of additional sensors (NDVI, thermal cameras) and citizen-science monitoring using roving sensors to provide ancillary information. In combination, these will allow both fine-scale resolving of flux tower footprints, and provide the data required to support upscaling of such measurements to city-scale within a predictive model. The project activities will focus on São Paulo in Brazil (>20 million population), taking advantage of cutting-edge eddy covariance expertise in Brazil, and UK expertise in modelling GI benefits, to establish proof of concept which can be transferred to other cities globally. Co-creation is important to improve the public acceptance and wider uptake of GI solutions. Therefore, through its citizen science engagement, the project will provide an educational role.GreenCities will produce an international case study that can be replicated elsewhere, in the UK, Brazil and globally. It will yield high-impact joint publications, exchanges among researchers, and development of a novel methodological approach and indicators for monitoring and evaluating the benefits of GI in urban parks using citizen science. Potential impact will include the development of transdisciplinary methods to holistically assess the ecosystem services provided by urban parks through public-researcher participation, to positively influence current thinking and effective implementation of GI for a multitude of applications.