KLIMES – Strategies and Concepts for Urban Planning to Mitigate the Impacts of Climate Extrems on Well-Being and Health of People in Cities | Umweltbundesamt

Background and Goals

Recent results from simulations of the regional climate change predict a significant increase of extreme heat waves in Central Europe. This negative change of the climatic conditions leads to an enhanced importance of human thermal comfort in urban planning. For its problem-specific consideration, quantitative assessment methods and thermal indices, respectively, have to be applied, which were developed in the field of human-biometeorology.

The cooperative project KLIMES deals with solutions for planning-related problems caused by the impacts of extreme heat in summer on people in cities. The main objective is to update and test existing guidelines for urban planning under the changed climatic conditions, which is based on human-biometeorological results considering environmental protection as well. The application of this guideline in different scales of urban planning should reduce the negative impacts of increasing extreme heat in summer on people in cities. So the impairment of human thermal comfort will not reach the extent, which strongly limits the quality of urban life.

The research is performed is the city of Freiburg in SW Germany. Due to its location at the eastern border of the N-S oriented southern upper Rhine plain, Freiburg represents the warmest city in Germany. Results of regional climate simulations predict heat waves for this region, which will be more frequent, longer and more intensive in the future.

Different urban quarters were selected as investigation sites in Freiburg based on the following criteria:

•  typical urban planning tasks in our climate region in the future,
•  current or finished urban planning tasks in the period of the present climate change,
•  typical urban structures for central European cities.

Different coordinated methods are applied in the selected urban quarters in Freiburg to obtain results for the human thermal comfort during extreme summer heat:

•  experimental investigations to analyse the perception of the thermal environment at exposed sites by a collective of people using the thermal index PET* (update of the international used physiologically equivalent temperature PET),
•  parallel interviews with people, based on standardised questionnaires, on their use of urban open spaces and their subjective perception of the thermal environment to grade the PET* results,
•  micro-scale simulation of human thermal comfort – with emphasis on urban structures and human behaviour – under current and future regional climate conditions in summer,
•  development of human-biometeorological strategies for sustainable concepts of the urban renewal based on the results of experimental investigations and simulations.

These methods will primarily be applied outdoors in selected urban quarters, but they will be additionally used indoors during parallel investigations.

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