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A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Regulating Ecosystem Services in Russian Cities: Can Urban Green Infrastructure Cope with Air Pollution and Heat Islands?
Urban green infrastructure (GI) performs a number of ecosystem services that can improve urban environment. Many studies are dedicated to regulating services (RS), heat mitigation and air pollutants removal in particular, since they directly effect the urban comfortability and human health. Most methods of RS assessment require time-consuming field works, usually not suited for multicity scale, but limited by smaller urban areas. We offer time-efficient methods to evaluate heat mitigating and air purifying services in 16 largest Russian cities, using available statistics, remote sensing data and results of similar works. For the assessment indicators we took 1) the percentage of removed pollutants by vegetation from total emissions from transport; 2) from point sources; 3) the percentage of urban area, influenced by the GI’s cooling effect. Our study revealed that the majority of cities do not have enough tree vegetation to absorb a significant part of all emissions, especially carbon oxide. At the same time, in many cases GI has a potential to cool more than 100% of urban area. However, the distribution of green elements is mostly uneven, leaving densely populated city centers not effected enough by cooling islands. The method we applied is still to be improved, as it does not consider meteorological and landscape differences for air purifying service, or all forms and sizes of GI to differentiate their cooling range. It enables, however, to get a general picture of the situation with RS volume in large cities of Russia, to define and locate the most problematic parts.
Regulating Ecosystem Services in Russian Cities: Can Urban Green Infrastructure Cope with Air Pollution and Heat Islands?
Urban green infrastructure (GI) performs a number of ecosystem services that can improve urban environment. Many studies are dedicated to regulating services (RS), heat mitigation and air pollutants removal in particular, since they directly effect the urban comfortability and human health. Most methods of RS assessment require time-consuming field works, usually not suited for multicity scale, but limited by smaller urban areas. We offer time-efficient methods to evaluate heat mitigating and air purifying services in 16 largest Russian cities, using available statistics, remote sensing data and results of similar works. For the assessment indicators we took 1) the percentage of removed pollutants by vegetation from total emissions from transport; 2) from point sources; 3) the percentage of urban area, influenced by the GI’s cooling effect. Our study revealed that the majority of cities do not have enough tree vegetation to absorb a significant part of all emissions, especially carbon oxide. At the same time, in many cases GI has a potential to cool more than 100% of urban area. However, the distribution of green elements is mostly uneven, leaving densely populated city centers not effected enough by cooling islands. The method we applied is still to be improved, as it does not consider meteorological and landscape differences for air purifying service, or all forms and sizes of GI to differentiate their cooling range. It enables, however, to get a general picture of the situation with RS volume in large cities of Russia, to define and locate the most problematic parts.
Regulating Ecosystem Services in Russian Cities: Can Urban Green Infrastructure Cope with Air Pollution and Heat Islands?
Springer Geography
Vasenev, Viacheslav (editor) / Dovletyarova, Elvira (editor) / Valentini, Riccardo (editor) / Cheng, Zhongqi (editor) / Calfapietra, Carlo (editor) / Inostroza, Luis (editor) / Leuchner, Michael (editor) / Illarionova, O. (author) / Klimanova, O. (author) / Kolbovsky, Yu. (author)
Smart and Sustainable Cities Conference ; 2020
Advanced Technologies for Sustainable Development of Urban Green Infrastructure ; Chapter: 6 ; 51-64
2021-05-11
14 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
Urban green infrastructure and ecosystem services in sub-Saharan Africa
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