Climate-Conscious Urban Growth Mitigates Urban Warming: Evidence from Shenzhen, China

Yulun Zhou, Bo Huang, Jionghua Wang, Bin Chen, Hui Kong, Leslie Norford

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Urban growth comes with significant warming impacts and related increases in air pollution concentrations, so many cities have implemented growth management to minimize "sprawl" and its environmental consequences. However, controlling the amount of growth is costly. Therefore, in this Article, we focus on urban warming and investigate whether climate-conscious urban growth planning (CUGP), that is, urban growth with the same magnitude but optimized spatial arrangements, brings significant mitigation effects. First, the classical spatial multiobjective land-use optimization (SMOLA) model is improved by integrating the spatially, diurnally, and compositionally varying associations between land-use and their warming impacts. We then solve the improved model using the nondominated genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to generate urban growth plans with minimal warming impacts and minimal cost of change without reducing the amount of urban growth. Results show that climate-conscious urban growth brings 33.3 ± 4.6% less warming impacts as compared to unplanned urban growth in Shenzhen, China, and suggest a compact and spatially equalized development pattern. This study provides evidence that spatial planning tools such as the CUGP can help mitigate human impacts on the environment. Meanwhile, the improved SMOLA model could be applied to balance urban development and other environmental consequences such as air pollution.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)11960-11968
Number of pages9
JournalEnvironmental Science and Technology
Volume53
Issue number20
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 15 2019
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This study was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0503605), which is gratefully acknowledged. Appreciation also goes to Qianhui Liang (MIT) and Michael Seidenkühnel for engaging in artistic designs of the cover art.

Funding Information:
This study was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0503605), which is gratefully acknowledged. Appreciation also goes to Qianhui Liang (MIT) and Michael Seidenku?ˆhnel for engaging in artistic designs of the cover art.*%blankline%*

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society.

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