Climate-driven transformations: A framework for the sustainable urban landscape system to enhance heat resilience

This study presents a transformative framework for building sustainable urban landscapes that are resilient to the escalating heat stress challenges exacerbated by global warming and urban heat islands. In contrast to traditional research that views landscapes as passive cooling tools, ignores heat damage, and adopts a static perspective on landscape heat resilience, this study innovatively redefines landscapes as dynamically sustainable systems, emphasizing their ability to withstand, recover from, and adapt to extreme heat and focusing on the dynamics of their cooling efficiency. The need for resilient landscape systems to support urban vitality and environmental health is argued by parsing the interconnections between landscape, climate, and human activities, detailing how user behavior patterns, exposure times, and demographic characteristics can inform planning and management. The framework follows the logic of the landscape industry and forms a pathway through the entire cycle, including heat vulnerability assessment, resilient landscape planning, spatial design, heat management practices, and post-evaluation. Heat vulnerability is assessed using tools such as remotely sensed data, meteorological observations, drone thermal imagery, and ground-based monitoring systems, with measures such as land surface temperature, vegetation indices, and thermal comfort indicators. Facing potential obstacles like financial constraints, technical difficulties, and political resistance, the framework employs cost-effective designs, adaptive technologies, and policy incentives to ensure feasibility. The study's insights contribute to a broader understanding of landscape heat resilience, providing actionable guidance to enhance urban landscapes' thermal comfort, ecological robustness, and overall resilience in the face of intensifying climate and impacts.