Between progress and obstacles on urban climate interdisciplinary studies and knowledge transfer to society

Julia Hidalgo (1) , Aude Lemonsu (2) , Valéry Masson (2)

1 LISST - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Solidarités, Sociétés, Territoires
2 CNRM - Centre national de recherches météorologiques

Cities modify their local climate and at the same time they suffer from the local impacts of climate change. This paper comments on progress and obstacles in three active research topics that contribute to increasing the capacity of 15 knowledge transfer to society within the urban climate research community. The first is linked to the production of urban surface description useful for urban climate studies. The conceptualization of 'Local Climate Zones' is now widely used to represent urban climate variability at the neighborhood scale. Land-use, morphological, architectural, and social data are also needed and those are being gathered using different approaches. The second is linked to the necessity of producing information directly connected to the effects on society. This requires a strong multidisciplinary 20 approach and nowadays, impact studies are not limited to one dimension but instead cover multiple dimensions. Finally, the third is to transfer all this information to city practitioners, so that urban climate features are considered, among many other aspects, in city management. For urban planning, the introduction of cartographic tools encompasses urban climate diagnosis as well as recommendations for future urbanization. 25

Mots clés: climate impacts; urban climatology; urban data; urban planning; urban climate maps

Domaines: Milieux et Changements globaux; Etudes de l'environnement

Julia Hidalgo, Aude Lemonsu, Valéry Masson. Between progress and obstacles on urban climate interdisciplinary studies and knowledge transfer to society. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2019, 1436 (1), pp.5-18. ⟨10.1111/nyas.13986⟩. ⟨hal-01962266⟩