Development of an integrative framework for urban heat mitigation and adaptation implementation

Urban heat, driven by heatwaves and heat islands, is increasing frequent, severe and intense in numerous cities. Many studies have been carried out to develop innovative materials, techniques, and methods for mitigation and adaptation. However, the implementation of mitigation and adaptation remains a challenge for urban planners. This study aims to close this gap by developing an integrative framework. This framework charts a closed loop of planning for heat-resilient communities by prioritizing performance-based implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies. The framework covers four key components including heat mitigation and adaptation need, technology database, decision-support system, and performance assessment. Need identification consists of a monitoring and forecasting system and a heat risk assessment indicator system to spatiotemporally identify the heat-risky time, locations, and groups for intervention. The technology database is designed to include all possible mitigation and adaptation solutions such as cool materials, green-blue infrastructure, morphology modification, and temporary facility setting, as well as parameters deciding their expected performance. The decision-support system enables urban planners, designers, and managers to match mitigation and adaptation strategies with particular planning, design, and management goals and targets in a science-based and context-specific manner. The status quo of decision-support systems was reviewed in terms of organizational structure, computation model, and user interaction pattern. Focusing on cooling schemes generated by the decision-support system, the performance assessment process is expected to verify and compare the potential schemes for optimization. Moreover, future research directions are demonstrated to address possible research gaps in achieving this integrative framework. Overall, this study provides insights into the transformation of urban heat sciences and technologies into actual planning and design.