Urban Heat Island ‒ A Strong Contributor to Climate Change ‒ Case Study of Jaipur with Emphasis on Urban Forestry and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Urban sectors are posing serious challenges presently and are likely to become an issue of great global concern in future. Around 55 percent of the total global carbon footprint is contributed from the urban sector resulting in climate change. The resulting contributing factors are mainly on account of continuous increasing urban population, non-optimization of concreting to non-concreting urban surface and vertical to horizontal spread of urban area coupled with other environmental parameters of relevance. These environmental issues are in the form of insufficient urban air ventilation, increasing urban heat island, inadequate carrying capacity of road network leading to traffic congestion resulting in enhanced air pollution, inadequate disposal and treatment of municipal solid waste and sewage and so on so forth. To address some of the issues referred to above, present research has been made by the authors to assess the urban heat island with emphasis on infusion of urban forestry. A case study has been carried out for Jaipur, Rajasthan, which has been divided into 14 grids with 56 locations where temperatures were recorded during the months of April to June 2023. Urban heat islands were calculated for different locations in Jaipur and isopleths were drawn using Surfer-9 software. An attempt has also been made to estimate an increase in energy consumption on account of the Urban Heat Island effect in Jaipur. To mitigate such an alarming UHI which is partly responsible for climate change, various mitigating measures were described with special reference to infusion of Urban Forestry in Jaipur.